It's currently in the 40s outside, but rumor and the weatherman say the snow is coming.
I wish I could still get snow days. I never appreciated them properly when I got them. As it is, I live close enough to the office that I can walk there, whatever the weather. Last winter, you may have seen me shuffling down Seward Street one morning, praying I didn't fall on my backside, as I made my way to work.
Snow days when I was in school, though, were different animals. My siblings and I would pray for snow days. Any reason to get out of school was a good reason. When we lived in Franklin, we'd play in the basement. We had a ping-pong table which was good for lots of fun. The basement wasn't finished, so there was no ceiling, only the floor joists. We'd try to bounce the ping-pong ball hard enough to make it rattle between the joists, which we thought was the most hilarious thing ever. Once we got tired of that, we'd roller skate. The basement ran the length of the house and was a concrete floor, so roller skating was no problem. We'd skate from the fireplace on one end around the ping-pong table on the other end and back. When we got tired of that, we'd use the ping-pong table as the structure for a roomy blanket fort. Toy cars and their related accessories would often find their way under the table. That was really more for my brothers. I preferred to read.
When Mom got tired of having us underfoot (usually early afternoon), she'd send us over to find Dad at school. We were only two blocks from the school, and Dad had keys. We'd knock on his window and he'd come to the door and let us in. We'd go to the gym where Dad would unlock the basketball cage and we'd shoot for a couple hours. The boys could have gone on for longer. Me, not so much. I'd shoot for awhile, but they were tireless. They'd shoot from everywhere on the court, having their own contests, while I'd work on free throws and jump shots. I wasn't that good, and I knew it, but without that practice I would have been much worse.
Sometimes my brothers and I would play in Dad's classroom. He had the coolest chalk holder, a lightweight metal tube in which you could put chalk and when you used it, the chalk dust wouldn't get all over your hands. We'd write "assignments" on the chalkboard while Dad was out running the halls. We'd take Dad's wheeled chair into the hallway (which we weren't supposed to do) and take turns pushing each other up and down the hall. The third person was the lookout, warning the other two when Dad was coming. Once we got the high sign, we'd hurry as fast as we could back to Dad's room, pretending we hadn't left the whole time he was running laps. I'm sure Dad knew what we were doing, but he never let on.
So when I see schools will be closed, that's what I remember.
