Snow Day

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

an old Unruh family photo

SNOW DAY

For hours, the snow falls. City crews plow, one blade following another. Shovels scrape concrete; a mountain of snow rises alongside driveways and sidewalks.

Classes are cancelled. Again. Snow days pile up on the spring calendar, extending the school year.

With area schools closed, I think of my own childhood winters. Whether they were snow days or weekends, if I had any say in how I spent my time, I wanted it to be at Amy’s.

Amy’s house had the energy of older (teenaged) siblings. She lived in a big old two-story home with four bedrooms upstairs. The house held a ping pong table and the aroma of chocolate chip cookies. But the best thing about Amy’s house was, of course, Amy.

During our grade school days, Amy and I were happiest if we were breathing the same air. She was like a sister, except that we never fought. There was never a rift, no unkind words spilt, no spats or cattiness, only ideas, only laughter.

So, back in the ‘60s, in those days when the race to the moon was on, when TV shows were filmed in black-and-white, when every telephone had a rotary dial, Amy and I played together – all day when we could.

On a winter’s day, like every kid, we’d collect spare blankets and quilts from around the house and build a tent, stretching quilts over furniture and securing their edges to the floor with dictionaries. I remember one night we spent on her living room floor, under a blanket-tent, watching a scary movie on TV.

A snow day might mean a game of Monopoly. And we stretched a game as far as we could, loaning each other money to keep on playing. And occasionally we’d leave pieces on the board overnight and finish it the next day.

We played a version of rummy, but not according to Hoyle. In an effort to keep the game going, and going, we kept adding decks of cards until we were shuffling seven decks, four of which were for pinochle. Does anyone play pinochle anymore?

Some days we built things, like a mechanical alarm clock in Amy’s bedroom. Its effectiveness, however, was dependent upon Helen, Amy’s mother, coming upstairs at the appropriate time and dropping a marble down a shoot. That marble caused a series of movements, including falling dominoes, and ended with a book toppling near Amy’s head to wake her. It worked.

And, having imaginations and the embedded guilt that we seem to be born with, we created dramas where there weren’t any. Makeup wasn’t allowed until we were in high school, but somehow we had acquired a three-inch eyebrow brush (likely found on the street.) We knew we’d be in big trouble if we were caught with beauty paraphernalia, so we set about finding a good hiding place. We dangled it from the window of Amy’s second-floor bedroom, but to our surprise, the string was shockingly obvious to anyone who looked up when approaching the house’s back door.

Like most kids, Amy and I were never without some sort of idea, and on one summer day, we came across an industrial-sized spool of twine in her old chicken house. We asked permission to use it, but I don’t think her mom inquired as to our plan, which was, of course, to see how many times we could circle the swing set with it, thus unknowingly creating the Largest Swing Set of Twine in Pawnee Rock.

I’m sure that was one of the (many) times Helen gasped when she looked out her kitchen window. And then we had to set the swing set free and de-twine it.

And surely there were times Helen would stop washing dishes to listen to the girl-created sounds in her house. If she heard bumping on the stairs ending in an “ow,” well that was probably us sliding on sofa cushions and hitting the wall where the staircase turned.

We always found something fun to do at Amy’s house, whether it was collecting $200 as we passed “Go,” or shuffling seven decks of cards, or sliding down the stairs.

A snow day is great fun if you get to spend it with a friend like Amy. And if you have no Amy, well, there’s no reason you can’t make a tent from blankets yourself, crawl inside it with a pillow, and take a long winter’s nap.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh