Snowy Valentine's Day

This past Valentine's Day was my most memorable. Bobby and I have never really celebrated the holiday, aside from our yearly tradition of buying discounted candy the day afterwards. We didn't even do that this year, since Bobby is trying to lose some weight. (Trying to lose weight is not a phrase loaded with positive reinforcement. I'd say Bobby has lost some weight after some dieting and exercise, but he wants to lose some more).

When I got up that morning and headed for the kitchen, I was completely surprised to see a panorama of snowflakes. Snow was not on the forecast. I am beginning to think that snow is so spontaneous and enigmatic that meteorologists often can't predict it. It's just too damn magical. It snowed through the workday, and I begrudgingly scraped my car to go to a meeting, and again when I left. A lot of Koreans did not go to work, as was evident when we went home early. There were about eight inches of powdery snow on the ground, and Koreans were everywhere trying to scrape it from the roads and sidewalks. Some were using shovels, some just had long boards. There was a festival atmosphere, with some young people taking breaks to slide down the hill on shovels. I guess over here scraping side roads is a neighborhood job. Bobby and I furtively watched from our house, feeling too much like outsiders to join. I eventually took the dog to the mountain, but only after I left Bobby with the camera and ordered him to take some pictures. When I got to our untouched path, I was very sorry I didn't have the camera. Deep, powdery snow in the woods has a beauty that I can't describe. Maya was ecstatic, and bounded through the snow like a maniac, pausing to take mouthfuls of it. I marched along behind, chanting, “whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though, he will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow.” Occasionally I slipped and fell, landing in a deep cushion of snow and laughing.

As a working woman who no longer lives in the south, snow has lost some of the magic it once had. Having to slide to work, trudge through half melted sludge, scrape my windshield, and get my feet wet makes snow my frenenemy. It's good to know that deep, powdery snow still holds the appeal to me that it did in my childhood.

Our friendly neighborhood mountain

Diligently scraping the street and parking lot