Steve West - Who doesn’t love a snow day?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 22nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Well, we’re in another of these named winter storms—this one, Oaklee—which is promising snow and ice from the West to the Southern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast and that’s expected through the end of the week.

EICHER: So that means snow days. WORLD commentator Steve West, along with some help from WORLD readers and listeners, is remembering some favorite snow days of the past.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: In Liberties, a weekly newsletter I write about First Amendment issues, I often ask a question. For the last two weeks, I asked readers to share a memory of a snow day. There were many, some lengthy–a few of which you’ll hear, like this one from Bob McLeod.

MCLEOD: Snow is always deeper when you're younger, right? Sure seems like it. Anyone who lived in Connecticut in 1978 remembers "The Big One"—48" of snow fell overnight (at least at our house). My dad carved out the sidewalk and driveway like cutting cubes of sugar. The governor closed the state for a few days while people dug out. For my twin sister and me,10-year-olds and shorter than the 48 inches of snow, it was epic.

WEST: Don’t you just love snow? Oh, I know, this is a North Carolinian speaking, someone who doesn’t live with snow… day in day out and shovel it all winter long. It’s 74 degrees on this February day! And yet for this southerner there’s nothing like the not common waking to the different light and different quiet of a snowy day, of pulling back the curtains and peering out from a warm room behind a windowpane cold to the touch at what poet Billy Collins called a “revolution of snow.”


Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling.

I have a friend in Minnesota who wears shorts and sandals in the winter. I thought of him when I heard this memory from Doug Norquist.

NORQUIST: We lived in the northern suburbs of St. Paul, Minnesota, and thought our school system was the slowest around when it came to canceling classes. Many days we rode the bus to or from school during snowstorms. It had to be an honest blizzard to bring a morning closure.

But on one April day, the administrator that usually made the decision was away, reportedly in Florida. We got a fair bit of snow—five or six inches, I think—but we almost didn't even check for school closures. For one thing, the forecast promised a change to sunny skies and mild spring temperatures. The administrative sub, however, hit the panic button and called off classes.

The forecast had been correct. Very soon the skies were clear and the temperatures mild. My cousins and I got together and celebrated by sunbathing. I must add that our mothers did not approve. And looking back, I'm sure it was not true sunning weather—perhaps 60 degrees F. But hey, we were Minnesotans.

Years ago—decades actually—we had an unusual two feet of snow here in the hilly Piedmont of North Carolina. After some next-day melting, the powdery mix froze ice-rink hard. In the late evening, our neighbors volunteered to stay with our sleeping children so we could enjoy some late night, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime sledding.

It was both thrilling—and dangerous. Our neighborhood has some significant hills and, shortly after our trip downhill began, we realized we hadn’t thought this through carefully. Yet there was no stopping. One mile later, we ran into a cul-de-sac curb, depositing ourselves in a neighbor’s yard, bruised but alive. By God’s grace, we lived on to see children to adulthood, our memories and bodies mostly intact.

WERHANOWICZ: I’m 70 and live in sunny Phoenix, far from snow days. But I still remember a day in Hereford, Texas when I was 5. In the panhandle of Texas all the time. One day we woke up to a solid wall of snow pushing against our front door. The back yard was bare! We took bowls to the front door, filled them with snow and made snow ice cream.

Thank you, Jodi Werhanowicz, for reminding me that we made snow cream when I was a child as well, only my mother wouldn’t let us eat the first snow, as the sky hadn’t been cleaned yet.

Doris Stanford shared a memory from an unusual-sounding town in northwest New Jersey. I’ll let her pronounce it.

STANFORD: It was my birthday, October 9th, in the mid-1970s, and the schools in Hopatcong, New Jersey, shut down because of only a few inches of snow. That was enough to make the steep hills in some parts of town dangerous for the school buses. But cars could manage the roads with no problems, and I spent a good hunk of my day at the home of a friend of mine who was a teacher at one of the local schools. My kids played with her kids, and I helped her correct English papers. A great way to spend one’s birthday!

I’ve searched the Bible and there’s no mention of snow falling in those mostly arid and hot lands—except in 2 Samuel where one of David’s mighty men struck down a lion in a pit on a day, it records, “when snow had fallen.” The New Testament records no snow falls at all.

Yet the Psalmist says “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” The prophet Isaiah has the Lord promising, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” And Matthew describes the angel that rolled the stone away from the tomb as having “clothing white as snow.”

When it snows I’m just thankful to be, as Billy Collins writes, “a willing prisoner in this house, a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow .... listening hard to its grandiose silence”—snow, that great disruptor of the ordinary day, that welcome reminder that in a “world fallen under this falling” the snow of Christ’s sacrifice covers every sin.

Thanks to WORLD readers Bob McLeod, Doug Norquist, Jodi Werhanowicz, and Doris Stanford for helping us all remember the wonder of a snow day.

I’m Steve West.

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