Igloo Memories

I remember my first true snow storm when I was growing up. It was the week leading up to Thanksgiving and my dad was on a business trip, leaving my mom, brother, and I home to attend school and go about our days. However, the weather dipped and the snow started to fall, and fall, and fall. The temps were well below freezing and the skies were grey with a hint of a snow blue cast.

We lived in a two story house with the main living area on the top floor. Our dinning room had a nice wooden deck off the slider and I remember watching the snow pile on top of the wooden slats, and wondering if it would cover the slider and I could peak through the accumulated pile from inside.

Hearing the news from my mother about the horrendous amount of fallen snow and freezing temps, my dad was concerned that the weight of the snow on the deck may hurt the integrity of it standing and we needed to shovel it off. What an adventure as a kid feeling the pressure to keep the snow cleared and all the "what ifs" that swirled around if we could not get our job accomplished. The eagerness to watch the deck and make my dad proud at cleaning it until he returned is still vivid in my mind.

He eventually returned, with the deck still standing.

That was also the year that we built an igloo in our front yard with our neighbors. Tired of sledding endlessly in the woods a block down from our house ... wait, did I just say sledding in the woods? Yea, one of the more brilliant ideas we ventured into as children. We survived that too, hitting trees and going through bushes with no helmet, we were smart. Back to the igloo ... using different sized buckets we had an assembly line of packing the snow and dumping the bucket over. Lifting the bucket would reveal a perfect shaped block of ice and snow. Stacking and stuffing the blocks into a circle, we worked around the clock and even into the dark one lucky night to accomplish our igloo-turned-fort.

I can still feel the bite of the cold to warm when we would come inside. The feeling of numbness of cheeks and hands turning back into a feeling. The hot tomato soup with toasted cheese sandwiches. The holiday cookies and hot chocolate with marshmallows on top. The fire place lit all day long. The static hair and dry skin itch as you stepped out of your snow clothes and into pajamas. The smell of wet, soggy clothes drip-drying on the wooden clothes line in the linoleum floored laundry room.

Snow days. Watching my children enjoy their snow yesterday and early this morning brought me back to fun childhood memories.