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TOMORROW'S FORECAST IS for...(cover your eyes if you just can't bear the thought of winter yet)...snow! Surely it won't be much, if it materializes at all. But if there are flakes, it will be the first of the season, which means that I'll think of my father. All through the years of my growing up, when snow was somewhat of a rarity and caused all kinds of gleeful leaping about whenever we chanced to get any, my father would greet the first snowfall (well, every snowfall) with these words:

"The snow had begun in the gloaming,
and was busy all the night
heaping the fields and the highways
with a silence deep and white."*

He never failed to say them. It never failed to give me a little shiver of excitement. Snow was a magical, glorious gift! When snow was coming down "in the gloaming", we would turn on the outdoor light at the living room windows, turn off the lights inside, and watch the flakes swirling to the ground. Daddy would build a fire in the fireplace. Mama would make a big bowl of popcorn. Always. That was the way is was. We would listen to Daddy's music on the record player and then to the radio as announcements were made...a long list of cities and counties--and their schools-- in which classes would be canceled the next day: Gloucester, Hampton, Isle of Wight, James City... please please please say Newport News! If the forecast was for an inch or more, well, naturally the buses couldn't run. So we'd go to bed happy. I'd snuggle beneath the covers and drift off to sleep dreaming of the snow drifting down and heaping up the silence, deep (I hoped) and white.

And for many long years, snow held its thrill for me...all through the years of listening with bated breath to the list of school closings for my own children (who were leaping gleefully about)...Berks, Chester, Dauphin...Lancaster?? please. please.

But as for snow tomorrow? Jumping the gun on winter...falling on the still unraked leaves? No longer so magical? It's not likely to charm me much, but it will make me nostalgic!



* James Russell Lowell, The First Snowfall, which Daddy slightly misquoted: It's ..."and busily all the night, had been heaping field and highway...."


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