From Writing Class

So, for my writing class today, we had to write a work of fiction with truthful elements in it about snow days. I really liked how my free write turned out, so here it is! It saves me the time of actually having to think of something interesting to say. :D

Snow Day

I’m wearing my pink footie pajamas, the ones with the penguins on them. My little brother and I are bouncing eagerly, waiting as Channel 2 scrolls through all the school closings. Why, oh why do we live in Oakland county and not Berrien? It seems as though time is going slower the closer we get to Clawson School District. My parents are watching over the rims of their coffee cups, amused expressions at our frustration. My dad’s lucky, he doesn’t have to wait for a snow day; he just has to tell them he can’t get the car out of the drifts that have been piling up since last night.

Normally at this point in the morning, my brother and I would be sitting down with our Corn Flakes (or, if we were lucky, Kix) and watching Sesame Street but today, such frivolities seemed trite. Who needed breakfast when your entire life was on the line?! A snow day would be the absolute coolest thing ever…at least since Christmas. We couldn’t even think about eating or Bert and Ernie when our happiness was on the edge of a knife.

Finally- finally! – we get to Oakland county. Bloomfield’s canceled. Bloomfield Hills. Bloomfield Township…honestly, couldn’t they have come up with more creative names? My little seven-year-old self is positively radiating with concern and anticipation. Wait. What was that? Could it have been- YES! Clawson! Clawson had a snow day! YES! Rationally, we knew that it would have been stupid for Kenwood Elementary to hold classes on a day when we got nine inches of snow and ice overnight, but seeing those white letters scroll languidly across the screen was an affirmation that we had the day to do whatever we wanted. We’d go back to sleep, get up, have a snowball fight, build forts and snowmen and then—

“All right kids, it’s time to shovel!” My dad’s vindictive glee was heart-crushing. With that one sentence, he’d effectively crushed our dreams of a day of fun. It was times like these that I despised living on a corner, and that we owned small, kid-sized shovels. Maybe I could ‘accidentally’ throw them in the garbage truck next Wednesday? Brandon and I exchanged wide-eyed, heartbroken looks, and began to trudge toward our rooms to get dressed. Damn.

***

Fast-forward a few years. It’s now 2006, and I’m a senior in high school, and the excitement of a snow day is only slightly diminished by the fact that I no longer wear footie pajamas. There’s been a deadly disease going about the class of 2007 – senioritis – and today’s reprieve has been a great day to actively avoid doing anything whatsoever that pertains to anything academic. I’ve recently become addicted to Chuzzle, a completely pointless computer game that, at the time, was chewing up any and all spare time that I might have.

As the snow fell in thick blankets and the wind howled, I was ensconced in my room, wrapped in blankets, with a gargantuan mug of hot chocolate in front of me. My mom was doing her thing, and I was doing mine. Lord only knows where my brother was. My dad had to go to work. I considered it punishment for making my brother and I shovel when we were barely taller than the snow that had fallen. Regardless, I was content. I was moving those fuzzy little creatures across the screen, delighting in making them pop when I made three in a row. Life was good.

And then the power went out. Honestly? I get one day off, and Mother Nature decides to knock our electricity out? That’s just not cool. My plans of spending the day watching movies and sitting aimlessly on the internet fizzled like the picture on my monitor. Sighing far more dramatically than was necessary, I flopped on my bed and contemplated the unfairness that was life.

It all turned out all right in the end, obviously. Against my will, I did have to shovel for a while, but I survived my powerless snow day. And after a whole day of literally doing nothing (there wasn’t really enough light to even read), I welcomed the opportunity to return to the overemotional humdrum that is high school.

***

Yesterday’s snow day differed greatly than those I’ve had before. Why, you ask? Well, this time I was in my own house with a driveway the size of Montana. Thankfully, my landlord had had the forethought to call a plow service to come and clear said driveway. However, the most logical place to put the snow was apparently directly behind my car. This said, I’m pretty sure a Jeep or a Hummer could have effectively bashed through this wall of white crap. But I don’t drive a Jeep or a Hummer. I drive a tiny, plexiglass Saturn SL-1, which has the distinction of being a car that royally sucks on snow and ice. So, unless I was willing to dig myself out of there, my car wasn’t moving until July.

I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that instead of shoveling the snow out of the way, we should build an arch to drive my car under, so my car would feel special. This idea very clearly demonstrates why I am an English major and have nothing whatsoever to do with architecture. Arches, it seems, do not like to stay without some kind of support, or at least a sound design plan. Within twenty minutes, all I had succeeded in doing was moving a vast quantity of snow on to my car. It was impressive in its failure.

My roommates and I are not known for our long attention spans, so after a short time we had moved on from getting my car out to claiming each of the five piles of snow the plow had left and making them into “snow palaces.” You’d never know we were all upper-level college students. Instead of doing anything that resembled productivity, we spent hours building roads to our palaces, turrets, windows, and, of course, ammunition. It wasn’t until the battle was actually set to start that we realized that none of us had any kind of tactical advantage, that we had failed to realize that in order to hit each other, we’d have to throw the damn snowballs about twenty feet in the air to escape our impenetrable fortresses.

Therefore our snow palaces, while beautiful, were completely useless. It was about this time that we all realized that if we didn’t get inside soon, our toes would fall off. We trekked inside, bringing roughly an inch and a half of snow inside with us. After a short battle with the guys (there are three of us girls, and only two guys. We girls usually win) we popped in He’s Just Not That Into You and sucked down about nine gallons of hot chocolate. Despite our fears, the power never went out, and the tree thankfully didn’t come crashing down on our cars.

As fun as this day was, I realized at about five o’clock that my car still wasn’t dug out. So, swearing rather viciously, I put my five layers back on and trudged outside to shovel, dig, and beg my car’s wheels to stop spinning. I toiled for about an hour and a half before my car acquiesced to my pleading and finally moved. By this point, I was chilled to the bone and I would have given just about anything to be able to fit into my pink penguin footies again. A bit of knowledge that all children are born with rang in my head- shoveling on snow days, no matter how old you are, sucks.