The Beauty of a Snow Day

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I have never been a fan of snow days. My thinking has always been that if we have school scheduled for the day, by golly, we should be in school, and no form of precipitation should alter that fact.  In St. Louis, every private and independent school decides on its own whether to have a snow day or not, and that decision rests with the head of school; consequently, in the 15 years that I served as a head of school there, we had very few school cancellations because of snow or ice. As a matter of fact, there were times we were one of the only schools in session and everyone else was off.  (You can imagine how popular I was with our students on those days!)  Many mornings saw me tromping up and down the streets of our neighborhood in my sweats and snow boots saying, “This isn’t so bad, we can still have school!”

One of my joys in coming to Bosque was learning that as a rule, private and independent schools in Albuquerque follow the APS schedule on snow-related delays and cancellations; although I enjoy making decisions, I was happy to bequeath this one to someone else.  So, for those of us who were already at school early last Friday morning, we were somewhat surprised when APS decided to call a snow day at 8:30 a.m.  However, we quickly acclimated to the cancellation, and as you can imagine, the school was extremely quiet and quite productive for getting those things done that always get moved to the back burner because we would rather spend time with students than deal with the always-increasing paperwork.

Witnessing the beauty of Sanchez Park in the snow, sitting and working by the fire in the Schoolhouse lobby with a bottomless cup of tea, and rediscovering that I actually do have a desk underneath those papers enabled me to appreciate a snow day in a way I hadn’t before.   Maybe because this surprise “vacation” day in late February gave many of us who have been ill the chance to rest and recuperate, perhaps it’s the sheer spontaneity of a snow day, or possibly it’s just the change in routine, but last week’s snow day felt like the perfect tonic.  Or it could just be as Bob Dylan once said, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

I looked online for essays about snow days, and I found one from the website this i believe that I wanted to share with you.  In her essay entitled, “Snow Days,” Natalie from Mount Kisco, New York, says so pointedly, “I think that snow days kind of remind you that even if your [sic] growing up, that does not mean that you have to stop being creative and fun. You can still be a little kid and snow days show that. You just get to let loose, be lazy, and have a relaxed, wonderful day.”  Wise words, indeed.  They reminded me of a magnet we have on our refrigerator at home which contains a picture of one of our favorite authors, the late Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and something he once said, “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

Perhaps the primary benefits of snow days are that they remind us all—regardless of our age— of the beauty of winter, to continue pursuing our dreams, and the need, as Bob Dylan sang, to stay “forever young.”