Waiting for the Snow

I hate snow. I hate driving in it. I hate how brown and yellow it gets. I hate the slush that forms when it melts. I hate slipping and falling when it turns to ice. I hate pushing piles of it off my car and chipping ice from the windshield and shoveling the driveway. I hate being housebound.

But I love that first flake.

Even more, I love the build-up before the storm.

I love the winter weather advisories that flash across the TV screen. I love the news alerts when weather advisories become storm warnings. I love the color-coded maps, indicating how many inches—in big block numbers—each town will get. I love checking the Internet and discovering that a mild storm has become a blizzard.

I love stocking up on milk and eggs and having an excuse to buy ingredients for chocolate chip cookies and planning a big pot of soup. I love hanging up a mental shingle that says “office closed due to weather” and giving myself permission to do nothing. I love seeing E. and F. stack wood in the fireplace. I love when stores close and people stay home and traffic disappears and the air turns still. I love the steel grey sky and the trace of warmth that fills the air just before the first flake falls.

Like a child waiting for Santa, I press my nose against the window and search the clouds, hunting for the first flurry. I scan the black asphalt and clean cars as they whiten and listen for the plows whose steel-jawed shovels scrape the streets like giant spatulas gathering frosting from the sides of a bowl. I look for footsteps in the early opaque film of snow cover, the trails of people headed home, where they will stay.