It's a Blizzard...Tennessee-style.

It's a Blizzard...Tennessee-style..even though that's kinda like calling an aquarium the ocean. It's OK to laugh at the southern reaction to a dozen snowflakes. We over-react to snow because we get so little of it. I call it the hopeful over-reaction. We always hope for more than we got the last time, deprived snow souls that we are.

A good snow day does us good. It makes us slow down and take a day off. It gives the schooled kids an unexpected break from school. It gives grocery stores a boost because we panic and make the "it-might-snow-I-must-report-to-the-mothership-for-milk-eggs-and-bread" run to the nearest Publix or Kroger.

It slows life. It gives good ol' boys with big ol' trucks extra chances to rescue wayward "foreign job" cars that don't weigh enough to keep them on the slippery roads, not that many of our little snowflakes ever really stick to asphalt. It gives reporters the chance to go to the park in the winter and create a little Rockwell-ian film of families having a snowball fight - nevermind that it takes 4 minutes to scrape together enough snow to actually make a snowball worthy of throwing. It brings out the child in all of us - even those who have maybe forgotten how to play.

Snow turns everything beautiful, even if it's just for the better part of one morning. Everything glistens..like the glitter fairy has been up all night throwing a party! It makes the muddy chaos of a well-loved backyard look positively majestic and the dirty up-turned Tonka dumptrucks look almost artful. It's pure snow magic, I tell ya. It's call for a celebration of all things winter! Mittens, magic and mocha with marshmellows, of course. (Oh, that's good. I gotta write that down.) :)

And the best part of the snow is the awesome photos. Pull out the camera baby and dump the Christmas images off the card. We have to take snow pictures. At least 300. Because you never know...we might not get any more snow this year and these may have to last me. Finally, now I can use a few of the three gazillion snow embellishements I've been hoarding!

Snow for this southern girl is a special thing, whether she's 6 or almost 36. See, I forget alot of stuff, but I don't forget snow. Every major snow of my life is etched on my brain. (Of course, it helps that I can count them all on one hand.) It came a similarly "major" snow in Texarkana in 1978 (back in the day when I was still an only child). I know because I was 6 and I spent the whole day riding on a magical tin cookie sheet (sorry mom) down the hill in the yard with my father, who also remembers that day well. Unfortunately, perhaps he remembers it for mostly different reasons. He remembers stepping off the porch onto the yard, thinking his big boot would surely crush through that snow to something solid, only to find out in a split-second that the snow was actually a sheet of surprisingly solid ice. This occured to him, right about the time his backside met the sheet of ice and he started s-l-i-d-i-n-g rather precariously down the slightly sloped yard, towards the mailbox. Of course, the first time was an accident but the next three million times we did it on the cookie sheet on purpose!

Southern snow. It's a wonderful thing!