It has been a long winter in the midwest. I mean, given that we have Netflix and all, probably not as harrowing as, say, the long, cold winter that the Ingalls family faced in the Dakota Territory in 1880, but a long one nonetheless.
My children have missed five and a half days of school due to weather. Five. And a half. A feeling of restlessness has descended upon our home, the kind of restlessness that all midwesterners in January know, a restlessness born of grey skies and static cling, born of dry skin and chapped lips, born of socks that keep getting wet when you step in a piece of snow that has been trekked in and left upon the floor.
The first snow day, as always, was joyful. We knew the weather was coming, and we got the snow pants and mittens and hats and boots all lined up the night before the storm. The next morning, with snow covering the ground, we texted friends and hosted, in our yard, a neighborhood snowball fight. Kids came from all around. A few of them made snow angels. Others built a snowman. Our enterprising young neighbors across the street made a sled ramp on their front steps. It was about as Norman-Rockwell-magical as a person would have a right to hope for in 2019.
And then.
Snow Day #2. Okay. Not quite as exuberant as Snow Day #1, and maybe the kids should check Google classroom to see if they’re missing anything, and maybe I should check those work emails. But okay.
And then.
Snow Day #3. When Snow Day #3 arrived, it had been more than a month since Snow Day #2. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with preparing my classes for the new semester at the community college where I teach, and I didn’t have it in me to organize a big neighborhood snow hoopla, but the kids and I spent the afternoon snuggled under a blanket drinking hot chocolate and watching the rebellion take on the AT-ATs in the great snow battle on Hoth, and what more could a person want, really, from a snow day?
And then. Snow Day #4.
And then #5.
By Day #5, I was getting rather desperate to get more work done. The kids were getting restless, too. In an effort to make myself buckle down, I organized something I called “let’s have one-room schoolhouse.” For two hours, the children and I sat at the dining room table, and they worked on doing extra reading and schoolwork while I worked on my classes. My youngest, ever a good sport, claimed to enjoy this and asked if we could do it again. Her older brothers? Not so much. That afternoon, when everyone seemed to be really getting twitchy after too much time indoors together, I declared that they should all go outside and play for at least 15 minutes. It was cold, sure—pretty darn cold—but they could bundle up, right? The pioneers used to stay outside for longer in worse weather, I figured, and they were fine. Right?
My children obliged. They bundled. They went outside. They sort of aimlessly walked around in the cold and half-played. But, as B.B. King once observed, the thrill [was] gone.
And then came another half. An early dismissal due to blowing winds.
And here’s the thing—the forecast says that for the next week, the weather is going to get worse. Daytime temps below zero kind of worse. And wind. And, hey, more snow.
Even as I type this blog, I am literally just waiting for the phone call to get the news for tomorrow’s inevitable cancellation. School, this semester, seems to be happening more in theory than in practice.
On social media, my friends debate: Should school have been cancelled? Maybe, maybe not. It’s always a tough call, and I do not envy superintendents for having to make it. I tend to err on the side of caution, but I realize I am lucky that I work at a job that also tends to cancel in bad weather, making those snow days at home a lot more manageable, save for the boredom and the twitchiness.
Meanwhile, we wait—something we aren’t too used to having to do in 2019. At a time when we can run much of our lives as we see fit from the press of a single button on our phone, winter in the Midwest reminds us that maybe we’re not in charge after all. We wait for the “school has been cancelled” phone messages, for the next storm to hit. Will it be as bad as predicted? Even better? Even worse? We wait for the boots to thaw, for the roads to get plowed, for the sun to shine. We adjust, we adapt. We make it work. We shovel the walks for our neighbors. We scrape the ice. We get seed catalogs in the mail and dream about baseball, and gardens, and bare feet, and we wait for spring.