Snow Reflections

Good February to you. This is Jennifer Johnson, and my first book with Resplendence, Holding Out for a Hero, is due out in April.

Saturday morning we woke up to a winter wonderland-another one. The temperature was in the single digits in the morning and hovered in the teens throughout the day. Here we are at the park Saturday afternoon. Can you believe there was no one else there? We've never had the park to ourselves before!! What a treat.

You'd think for a southern girl like me these days would be traumatic, but you know, once I figured out what that white stuff was (and especially what wool socks were) I've come to enjoy the snow.

When it falls on the weekend, of course.

Working women find snow week days troublesome because most of the time taking your kids to work with you does not work out so well.

But these Saturday snow days, now they I like.

For the first time my kids ate snow ice cream. You know, it tasted almost as bad as it did when I made it and ate it with my best friend Lane Cook when it snowed one of the few times in Alabama back in the 1970s. My childhood ice cream had bugs and such in it. I guess the snow was a light dusting and so when we gathered the snow, we got more than just the snow.

It tasted horrible, and it crunched.

Terrible snow ice cream.

Now these thirty-something years later it was time to try again with the fresh snow, the clean-on-the-top snow.

It still tasted like dirt. I guess that is because you gotta have a little dust to make your snow flake. Oh, well. I guess when Nero Claudius Caesar sent his slaves to the mountains to get ice and snow for his drinks, he cared more about the cool drink than the dirt in the bottom. They didn't have machine dish washers back then either, so he probably tasted dirt a lot.

When snow stays around for a while, you have to get creative. We've made snow people, snow furniture, snow soccer fields. We've gotten the food coloring out and made rainbow snow. We haven't made igloos yet, but that's next on the list. However, seeing as how this is February, we may be looking at next winter (sniff, sniff).

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