My grandmother would tie a woolen scarf  under her chin, and tie similar scarves under ours, and take us outside, into the knee-high snow, to play Fox and Geese. 

By my reckoning, she would have been fifty-eight years old, my brother and I not school-aged yet. She stamped out a large circle in the snow, then stamped radiating lines across the circle until she had created a wagon wheel with spokes. 

She was the Fox, and chased us around the perimeter of the circle, using the spokes to bring her closer to her prey.  We were the Geese.  It was an elaborate, frozen game of  tag she played as a child,  and for a time we, too, were children of the prairie, fluffy snow flakes flying, a small game on a winter’s afternoon, after chores, before a lamp-lit supper. 

We didn’t last long at the game, and of course we had no chores, and supper was whatever she had and fully illuminated by OMU.  But first we had snow cream, which froze our small brains, and we ate it because we had begged for it, not because it was all that good. 

Well, it is pretty good, the sugar never melting so that sandy sensation in the mouth, the race to get it down our gullets before it melted completely as we scooted the last little clumps of ice around our bowls with half-frozen spoons. 

On such afternoons my grandmother was most her Indian Territory self, practical and uncool, making us wear odd garments, socks for mittens, wonky sunglasses she found in the back of a drawer to protect our eyes from the snow’s glare.  I liked those sunglasses, and was embarrassed by them, and she didn’t seem to notice or care. 

Even then, especially then,  I was easily embarrassed. The get-ups, the old woman’s scarf tied around my brother’s chin.  But she was also more amenable to us playing in the snow than my mother.  Granny played with us out in it.  She gave us shovels and then quarters when we cleared her walk.  She laughed. No, she giggled as she chased us, a fine, frosty tinkling. 

Snow in my own backyard meant fun at first followed by bickering. Snowball fights that ended in tears, disagreements on the construction of the snowman, even when the the snow did not cooperate.  We never completely dressed one, never could agree on material for the eyes, never a carrot for the nose but a stick, and it didn’t matter anyway, because his head got knocked off right sharpish. 

What stressed my mother most was all the piles of pajama bottoms and jeans stripped off and sopping on the family room floor.  Snow encrusted mittens and sock caps draped on every radiator, the way we were overheated and freezing at the same time and the monitoring of our running noses. 

She might make hot chocolate, but her heart wasn’t in it, and I think of her in those moments less like a McCall’s mom and more of a down and out waitress at a late night greasy spoon, slinging hot drinks for the drunks. 

All of this, though, wasn’t the real essence of snow days. A snow day was a protracted event.  Would it snow, how much, how deep, school or no school?  Conversations we held lying across someone’s bed, our chins propped on our fists as we stared out the window into a winter gloaming.  We didn’t have weeks to anticipate a snow storm, a few days at best.  We had Marcia Yockey, our tri-state character of a meteorologist, drawing on a board with thick black markers, her checkmarks backward, because she was left-handed. 

We were earnest in our discussions, cooperative, even, because it took a team to dissect the vicissitudes of Ohio Valley weather patterns.  That river, always the dividing line, a bridge span dictating snow or rain, wind or calm, something we understood before we could talk.

I should have been born in the frozen North. Or the prairie, perhaps, like my grandmother.  I thought this as a child. I Think it now. There are those who call me insensitive, here in my warm house, longing for snow.  I don’t have to work in it, get out in it, even.  That is true. But still, I love it, and like most things we love, I can’t do too much about it. I love it for its  powerful, beautiful and, sometimes, destructive nature. The thing I await, and for which I prepare.  My self small in comparison.  And in all of that, a specific kind of joy.