Snow Days

Earlier this week I happened to be in Henry Bear’s Park, a lovely toy store in Brookline Village. As I waited for the clerk to ring up my purchase, a set of Caran d'Ache washable markers to contribute to the office toy drive, an older woman was making a purchase that caught my eye. In her arms was a giant toy snowplow truck for a little boy in her life that had specifically requested the item, somewhere in the vicinity of $60 to $70.

Since we had only light snow earlier this month and it melted pretty quickly, I realized the child’s request was gleefully anticipatory. It felt sort of like buying that fitted, belted down coat with fur-trimmed hood and stylish La Canadienne snow boots back in October, not knowing exactly when I could justify wearing them without looking foolish.

As a child, I was ecstatic when the New York City Public Schools were declared closed for snow – especially if we were scheduled to have a test in my worst subject, math. With my stay at home mom, the main worry was her being driven to distraction by three children routinely ringing the bell in need of another set of dry clothes after getting snow inside their boots.

I don’t think my siblings or I gave much thought to Dad’s problems commuting from Queens to Manhattan in stop and start traffic, made even more difficult by icy roads. His Oldsmobile didn’t even have front wheel drive.

When I became a working mom, the worries multiplied. What would I do about childcare? Was Daphne old enough to stay home by herself without getting into too much trouble? Would I be able to get the driveway shoveled out enough to get my car onto the street so I could drive to the train station?

Once at the parking lot for the train station, would the mounds of snow dumped by front-end loaders reduce the number of available parking spaces so severely that I’d be forced to drive home or drive all the way into Boston, where if I could find parking it would be at least $18? (Oh, how I date myself.)

I could always judge the severity of the snowstorm by peering out the window of my second floor bedroom, and judging the extent to which my car was buried. The “can’t you find some kids to shovel” comment proved irritating.

We lived in a neighborhood where kids had too many scheduled artistic and sporting activities to even consider anything so mundane as earning spending money. Even when my neighbor found a reliable plowman for all of us, I knew there would be the repeated backbreaking task of shoveling away the mounds of snow pushed against the driveway’s edge by the municipal plows.

Yesterday was a lazy Saturday morning permitting me to sleep in and then sip coffee inside the comfort of my Brookline condo with two underground parking spaces. Opening my MacBook I scanned utterances from the more than 400 friends, family members, perfect strangers, and institutions I follow on Twitter.

A punishing snowstorm had already hit Delaware – based on a Twitpic of a completely blanketed Wilmington that my son-in-law’s brother, Dan Horowitz, had posted. The snow hadn’t started here in Boston yet. With enough Bell & Evans chicken, panko crusted onion rings, green beans, and whole grain bagels in the freezer, plus peanut butter in the cupboard, I thought my time would be better spent cleaning our home than braving lines of hoarders at Whole Foods.

A woman from Duxbury who Tweets as BackPorchSoap sounded giddy about the prospect of people living near the Cape getting as much as 20 inches of snow by the following day. My friend Steve, living in Washington, D.C. where two feet of snow has no doubt paralyzed an area that never seems to have enough plows, said he looked forward to the prospect of a relaxing weekend at home.

The “following day” has come. I can hear the scraping sounds of the plows, but the snow doesn’t look especially deep. Assuming the steep ramp leading down to the parking garage has been plowed and sanded, I will soon drive over to HealthWorks for the workout I didn’t do yesterday.

The luxury of not having to shovel allows me to say I’m not a weather wimp. Not that Dennis and I have completely dispensed with snow issues. Time passes but memories don’t, and my husband and I spent seven hours inside his aging Geo Prism on that not so long ago day Mayor Menino decreed that the whole world should leave downtown Boston at precisely 2 p.m.

Though I have no Floridian or Caribbean trips planned this winter that will evoke fears of a snowstorm preventing me from flying out of Logan, I am praying for clear skies the day Daphne flies in from Florida. The two of us will be flying to Paris together, and I don’t want anything to disrupt our plans.

When Daphne and her husband were here last weekend, the first question she asked as we walked to our car in Logan’s Central Parking was whether there was snow on the ground. I guess the freezing cold temperatures weren’t enough, and she looked crestfallen when I told her whatever snow had fallen earlier in the week had melted.