In the meadow we can build a snow ... thing.

We got the big one! Big snow in Alabama means the brown grass doesn’t show through. Oh, we celebrate even the little snows. We close the mall and break out the jigsaw puzzles as if there were a blizzard of Rankin-Bass proportions causing an avalanche at the door of our wooded cottage. Cheese. There. Real people do not say the word cottage without ending it with cheese.

We build undernourished snow women because we can’t really come up with enough snow to roll a big enough ball for a round belly, but we can scrape together a six or seven foot area enough to make a little twelve-inch hill. And with all the dried, dead grass sticking out of it, it makes a tweed-like skirt for the base of our snow person. It’s not exactly Currier & Ives, but we’re happy. We don’t exactly have a corncob pipe on hand, and we sure can’t form a hand big enough to hold a broomstick, but with a few mismatched buttons, some yarn and a coffee can hat, we’ve got a - um - we’ve got something.

That’s the end product most years. But there was another year like today, where we could truly measure inches rather than just wondering if the grocery bag leaked confectioner’s sugar on the way down the sidewalk. We were ecstatic, piling ourselves up on cookie sheets and pushing ourselves off with a grunt and hands dressed in oven mitts covered with Ziploc bags. I’m telling you, we’re never prepared for this kind of weather around here, but we get as creative as Frank Baum on Nyquil. 

So that year, my daughter was mixing orange Kool-Aid into the snow and making a snow cat. (Yeah, she’s mine.) She was trying to win the WAAY 31 Snowman contest, and I gotta admit, the cat was a contender. But then she started seeing the other entries on there, and became disheartened.

“I’ll never win,” she said in true Jan Brady life-is-over form. 

“You never know,” her brother said. “Sometimes things happen that you never thought could. I would have never thought I could ever be chosen to carry the flag at the Constitution Village field trip. But I was. So you just never know.”

“Enoch!” (She was not consoled.) “That does not take skill. That’s getting picked to carry a flag. Building a winning snowman takes skill, and mine is just not as good as some of them.”

“Miriam, it does take skill to carry a flag. I had to carry it with both hands, and my pants were falling down.”

You can’t argue with it.

When we get snow like this, the world stops for days on end. It’s exactly like the COVID quarantine, but without the fever and Q-tip up your nose. We spend our lives in pajama pants, and put on three or four pairs to go out and slide for ten minutes. It’s an Alabama ski-suit - four layers of fuzzy Christmas pajamas, and the bathtub is full of them.

Yeah, you can read that and think our necks are pretty red around here. Well, they may be, but if they are, it’s from chafing in temperatures we’ve never heard of. Our thermometers don’t even know what to do with it. We’ve never been this close to a zero since Physics class.

Our men do men things like donuts in the church parking lot, and our friends up north laugh at us for posting pictures of snow cream. Go ahead and yuk it up! We’re living our best life down here. We scrape snow off our cars with a spatula while it’s still fresh, and mix it up with vanilla, sugar, and milk. Yes, we do know the main ingredient is glorified outdoor water, and that’s what makes our bladders stop us mid-snow woman to run in the house in time to get all four pairs of pajama pants off for a pit stop. But it’s delicious!

We’re snowed in, and we love it. I’ve never seen a snow plow except on the Frosty the Snowman Christmas special. A few stores carry snow shovels but they’re always on clearance with no takers because no one knows what they’re for. So when we get this kind of snow, we can easily have a six car pile-up backing out of the driveway. We just can’t drive in it. 

Unless you count driving lawn mowers roped to garbage can lids.

Have fun. Stay warm. Don’t run out of Ziploc bags.