Snow Day

I post this picture in spiritual solidarity with all my friends in the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic states who are dealing with the four letter word I find most offensive: snow. St. Louis, my home for more than 16 years, is getting about a foot this weekend.

A foot of snow will have far less impact on St. Louis than two inches has on Atlanta. Trust me; I’ve experienced both. In 2011, we got six inches of snow on MLK Day weekend. Temperatures stayed below freezing for almost a week, so the snow didn’t melt. The city was shut down for the whole week. A few years later, a midday snow storm caused such massive traffic jams that some of my friends didn’t get home from work until the next morning.

I took this photo a few years ago, shooting right out of an upstairs bedroom window into the dogwood tree next to our house.

Bluebirds live here year ‘round. And when it gets cold, they puff themselves up, using the air between their feathers as insulation. As snow here is pretty uncommon—we can go a two or three years without getting any, and rarely get more than a few snowfalls in a winter--it doesn’t seem to interrupt their food supply. So they come through it okay.

That is my wish for everyone being snow on this weekend.