Winter Gets The Cold Shoulder

OK, let’s get this out of the way right off the snow shoe: I hate winter, and all that implies.

I don’t like biting wind, I don’t like cold and the only ice I really care for either comes out of Sonic’s magic ice-makers or is accompanied by some of the finest offerings from Lynchburg, Tenn. And I know better than to drive on it.

I don’t have anything against snow. Actually, that’s a bald-( or frostbitten-) faced lie. I have lots against snow, starting with how it’s cold and wet and impossible to travel on and including how hard it makes finding your golf ball.

Now I know I’ve discussed winter weather before. But this bears repeating, mostly because this winter seems to keep repeating, and repeating, and repeating … .

However, I am willing to accept the possibility not that I’m wrong, but that there may be something of a difference of opinion at the Smith Ice House and Sled Chalet. And as with most things, it may fall along generational lines.

It seems, as with most households, the adults around here view snow a little differently than the children. Specifically, snow days.

For kids, snow days are the equivalent of finding $5 in your pocket. They’re the candy bar from Halloween you come across in your sock drawer. They’re playing with house money. At home.

Or at a neighbor’s house. But definitely not at school.

To a school-age child, a snow day means you get to sleep in, sled, have a gigantic snowball fight, build a snowman, descend on the refrigerator like a swarm of locust and leave a pile of wet clothes larger than one of those concrete barriers outside the White House, and just as difficult to get around, at the front door.

Then in the next half hour, they’ll sit on the sofa and play video games all day.

Because, not only can they not make them go to school, they’ve officially told them that it’s in their best interest not to. How sweet is that?

Adults realize, mostly by sad experience, up to and including heated conversations with the IRS, that living for today sounds like a great philosophy, but it only works if you’re a house fly. Sooner or later, the piper must be paid, chickens come home to roost, loose lips sink ships (sorry, got stuck in “cliche” mode), and any and every bad thing you wanted to avoid must be dealt with in a badly compressed time frame. In short, you’re going to have to go to school.

You can either do it now, when you don’t really have anything else better to do, or you can do it in June, when it would be almost impossible not to find something you’d rather be doing.

Also, technology that did not exist when we adults were younger (yes, I know, a pretty substantial body in and of itself), has allowed us to “work from home.” Which is to say, we can start working from home. Then, all the really cool, way out there stuff that functioned so well when it was invented, in 75-degree weather in northern California, will suddenly and with no reason, not work. Or will work, and then not work, and then work again, sort of a like a demonically possessed traffic light with ADHD.

So, instead of realizing we can’t work, accepting we’re just home for the day and resigning ourselves to making cookies, building snowmen and brewing up hot chocolate (or sitting on the sofa watching an endless loop of ESPN highlights.

Whichever), we feel like we really, really need to be getting that report out.

Which means we will eventually become incredibly frustrated and will try to creep into the office. We’ll in all likelihood wind up in a ditch, or lose years of our lives to the absolute terror of seeing our car or another car suddenly decide its rear end needs to be where its front end should be. And then changing its mind.

Frequently and repeatedly.

For kids, snow days are a mini-vacation, a hall pass with no halls. For their parents, they’re scary, dark and inconvenient. Sort of like adulthood in general.

Parents, don’t worry: Unless we’ve all been magically transported to Alaska, this will soon be over and spring will, well, spring. And for kids, enjoy it while you can. Hopefully the memories will sustain you until school lets out. At this rate, that will be right around the Fourth of July. Then maybe I won’t be the only one hating winter.

GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 01/16/2014

Upcoming Events