Melt Your Heart

It snowed! Twice! In March, in Little Rock. Unheard of. After telling the boys to abandon hope for this year, they got two days of actual inches of the stuff. They made snowballs and snowboulders and drank hot chocolate, and the next day, spring would pick up right where it left off. Forty-eight hours of winter, all told, with a three day rest in between and book-ended by days in the mid to high 50s. A winter that all winters should be modelled on, in my opinion.

I envy my sister many of the fruits of her choice to stay in my hometown of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and raise her family there. Suiting up small kids in snow suits, hats, scarfs, mitten and boots every day for four months of the year is not one of them. Mornings are hard enough. Neither do I miss shoveling driveways, the cold weather equivalent of trying to bail water out of a hole dug in the sand at the water's edge. A hole big enough to fit your car in. With a plough driving by every few hours to help push all the water back in.

Okay, there's no equivalent. That's why I live here, with scant regret for the hassle of northern winters. But I admit, I had quite forgotten that in addition to delivering a children's amusement park to your yard, a good snowfall can do this: