Weather

If you read any other New England area blogs, you know that Mother Nature taunted us with spring this weekend only to turn around and dump snow on us again today. It doesn't bother me so much - air pressure...and its relation to the sinus pressure I feel in my face is much more important to me - but every time it snows now, I keep thinking "This is our last snowfall here"

As if we were moving to, you know Aruba, rather than - oh wait: WE STILL DON'T KNOW - but it will be in Massachusetts and likely not more than 20 minutes in any direction, you big baby.

But there's this tree outside my mother's room that gets beautifully heavy with snow, and I think about the three blizzards - and at least 3000 snowfalls - I've watched burden that tree's limbs. I think about how excited my little sisters were the first time it snowed enough to reach the bottom of the swings in the backyard swing set, and how I pretended to be totally nonchalant about it when they begged me to take them out - I was probably 12, and totally too cool for school - but then I dug in with both feet when we got out there. (Which, btw - when snow reaches the bottom of a swing, do you know what that makes it? A chair, basically. Not as much fun as you'd think.) I think about how the year I finally got my own room - which later wound up being the year I got sick and had to stay in bed for 37,000 hours - was the year that tinsel like icicles formed outside the window by my bed and how I used to stare at them for hours while the reflection of car lights made them glitter, hoping that things would just Get Better.

Of course, then I also have to think about the year we painted the radiators (in the summer!) and when the heat came up that winter, the hideous, ever present smell. And the fact that the holey kitchen ceiling continues to drip in new and inconvenient places when the snow is heavy on the roof. Or how, in the spring, the tree in the schoolyard next door drips these Very Aggravating yellow buds onto every available surface. And the smell of the hydrangeas that grow in the front yard - and the humongous bees that live in them. Or about 14 million other ways that this house? Just doesn't work for us.

It'll be nice to have something that does. (Now we just need to find one.)