Any prediction of winter weather keeps me from sleeping well.
“I remember that happening to me, too,” a friend told me recently–“back in middle school.”
Well, since I’m still in middle school, today’s winter storm warning–I think the first of this season–had me cheerful, tolerant (mostly), and rather optimistic about life in general.
But I’ve been way, way disappointed before; whole weeks have been thrown out of kilter from a Monday night storm dissipation, although probably never as bad as the story told me quite a few years ago by a teacher at my old school about a faculty snow party one school night when a big storm was supposedly bearing down: by midnight, many wings and beers later, no snow had fallen.
“There were a lot of hurting teachers the next day,” he said. “At school.”
Our five school delays and cancellations so far this year have been for trivial flurries or occasional frozen raindrops, at least as far as I could tell.
(Apparently a school board member, fed up with the “What the heck?” comments from disgruntled parents left with daytime parenting, posted some relevant snow-on-the-road photos to Facebook, but I remain skeptical. As a coworker has told me several times already this year, “We’re such wimps.”)
(Back when I was in school, I remember, my bus driver, Jim, would stop to put on or take off snow chains en route to school. And once I remember the bus stopping on an icy mountaintop–a pickup had slid into a field–and another pickup truck sliding into us from behind. That was the same year I wore out two pairs of boots from walking uphill both ways to and from school.)
I don’t mind trivial free days for playing guitar and singing, hanging with the girls, and helping out in the kitchen, but I do mind getting my hopes up for Some Weather Eventfulness and having my hopes dashed time and again after restless nights of uncertain snow dreams. Someday I’ll learn what I’ll tell my students: “Snow? Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
For now, though, here’s to another fretful night.
