Latitude Adjustment

Longing for snow

Feb. 2 , 2007
By JOSEPH M. DELEON News-Post Staff
jdeleon@fredericknewspost.com

    FREDERICK — There's not a lot of snow where I'm from.

Texas Hill Country occasionally gets snow flurries, but snow is rare in downtown San Antonio.

But in January 1985, south Texas was blanketed with more than 13 inches of snow, shutting down the city for almost a week. I was 11 years old the first and last time I saw snow before moving to Maryland.

The seventh- and eighth-grade boys were chasing each other in a field just outside of the main entrance to Alan B. Shepard Middle School.

I had a runny nose and my ears were beet-red, but I kept just out of reach of the kid who was “it” when several boys started shouting, “Hey, it's snowing!”

The heavy thud of feet running and din of children screaming faded as if the air suddenly stopped carrying sound. Slowly, the occasional murmur of disbelief broke the silence.

At first, small slivers of ice drifted through the air like miniature white leaves from a tree hidden high in the clouds. The snowflakes made a patchy white pattern on the ground as they landed on the dead grass and bare dirt.

Within minutes, the flakes grew larger and began to fall more regularly, but still at a lazy pace. When they touched, they stuck together and fell a little bit faster, some spiraling to the ground like a curled feather.

Everyone stood motionless, gazing at the sky as if we had all been touched simultaneously in a game of freeze tag. Plumes of steam rose at odd intervals from everyone's mouth.

I stood with my arms outstretched, chin up, mesmerized by the sight of millions of white flecks growing larger as they criss-crossed through the sky.

Later that week, south Texas shut down. The City of San Antonio didn't own a single snow plow. Salt for melting ice didn't exist. Construction trucks attempted to pour gravel on city streets, but stopped when they couldn't keep traction. They were literally abandoned where they stood.

For the next three days, children and adults played in the snow. Most of the kids in my neighborhood wore sweaters topped with jackets, scarves and ski caps, but some of us didn't own gloves. Oven mitts were a clever, if poor, substitute.

The snow was crusted with about a quarter of an inch of ice. Walking through the snow made a wonderful crunching sound, but it soaked our feet with icy water.

None of us knew how to make snowballs. At first, we simply scooped it up and flung it at each other as if we were splashing water at the beach. It didn't take long to figure out how to pack it well enough to rival the hardness of a baseball.

Everyone wanted to build a snowman, but we couldn't figure out how to roll the snow. We decided it was a myth that only worked on cartoons.

We relied on the time we spent building sand castles at the beach. Snow packed into a 5-gallon bucket is heavy. And it makes for a stumpy freak of a snow creature — more tube than man.

Every day, the snow turned more to slush and was less white. Eventually, it looked like a rocky road ice cream factory exploded nearby.

I didn't see snow again until a few weeks ago when Frederick had its first snow of the season.

Oddly enough, a couple of weeks earlier, San Antonio had a bad ice storm that shut down the city again. It was the same weekend I spent walking around the National Zoo in a light sweater.

I expected to see several feet of snow when I moved to Maryland. I thought it would start snowing in December and stay on the ground through March.

But an inch and a half of snow was almost as magical for me as it was in 1985.

As it collected on the sidewalk and street, my financee Denise and I stood outside. We stared at the swirling tufts of frozen water, just waiting for enough to build up so we could play.

We made snow balls and tossed them at the neighbor's house. They exploded with a soft thud, sending a powdery puff to the ground. It wasn't wet and slushy like it was in San Antonio.

We took pictures to e-mail back home. When the snow let up, our hearts sank and we went inside. When the snow fell heavier, we ran outside again and marveled at its simple beauty.

I felt like a child again.

Then I woke up the next morning for work. Nothing makes you feel grown up again like working up a sweat shoveling snow and scraping ice off your windshield.