It was a Friday morning, and my day had gotten off to a late start. I stumbled still half-asleep into the living room, and the sound of Cartter’s heavy footsteps hustling from his bedroom in the back hallway roused me to alertness.
“Scotty, guess what I found?”
Scotty matched his older brother’s tone of enthusiasm in response: “Jack Frost roasting on an open fire?”
Outside, there was snow on the ground, and school had been cancelled for the third day in a row. Since I moved to the lowcountry as a 5-year-old, I can remember three prior snow events, and one of them wasn’t enough to cancel school. Of the other two, Cartter was alive for one but was too young to remember. In effect, neither child had seen snow before now.
We kept them home all week even though school was in session on Tuesday. Monday was MLK day, and we saw no good reason to send them for one day and risk the flu virus that’s going around. Scotty actually hadn’t reported for school since Wednesday of the previous week. He woke Danyelle and me at 1:00 a.m. that night, sick. I’ve since wondered about the worst ways humans have been awakened throughout history – the synthetic blare of the digital alarm clock is certainly high on the list; so too, I imagine, is the sound of Viking marauders setting fire to the village roofs; and somewhere between those two on the scale of undesirability are the softly uttered words of a 6-year-old at one’s bedside, “I think I need to throw up,” followed by gagging coughs. A person jerks from sleep like a fish that’s just felt the sting of the hook in its jaw and immediately starts issuing frantic instructions to run to the bathroom. All to no avail. There’s a permanent vomit stain on the carpet now just inside the door to our bedroom. For as long as that carpet’s in place, it will mark the beginning of the norovirus ordeal we recently endured.
After Scotty and Danyelle suffered with a shred of dignity, I handled my twenty-four hours of pain, fever, and vomiting like a pathetic child, except worse, because unlike a child, I’m coming to grips with the idea that I might actually be capable of dying. I was pretty sure I had some kind of an impaction or internal bleeding, so great was the discomfort brought on by my intestinal swelling and the delirium that accompanied my fever. Amazingly, Cartter escaped the bug unscathed. His apparent invulnerability aside, Danyelle and I were still in no hurry to risk exposure to another illness by sending him and his brother into school for one pointless day while we were in a weakened state. Of course, it turns out that their two best friends, both of whom they’ve been playing with during their time off, have flu in their respective homes. Here’s to hoping those shots work.
Cartter and Scotty were thrilled by their first snow. They spent all day Wednesday out in the cold, getting their clothes soaked and risking frostbite so they could pelt each other alongside all the neighbors. There was a semi-official congregation in the playground, and a girl who lives down the street smashed an icy snowball in Cartter’s face at point blank range. I teased him when I heard the story, but he didn’t really blush until I mentioned the name of another girl, a cute little blond who lives across from his assailant and who shares his birthday.
Absent parent-inspired gatherings, neighborhood boy groups assembled in an ad hoc fashion, packing snow into balls, hurling said balls through the air, rolling snow into boulders, and stacking solid chunks of snow into Stonehenge-style structures. Proper attire was optional: some wore t-shirts; some wore crocs; but no matter how they were dressed, all the little children went about the streets and yards with apparent certainty about what to do. I imagine the pure white snow covering their suburban enclave represented for these little tribes the physical manifestation of freedom, their work with the substance a controlled but rageful protest against their enemy, the social customs and obligations that keep them from their purpose, which is apparently total and enthusiastic absorption in the business of idleness.
The adults were hardly any different. Walking up the frozen street on the other side of the park that abuts our house, Danyelle and I came across an impromptu block party. An excess of smiles and friendliness greeted us there, as acquaintances hailed us while drinking prosecco and espresso martinis from red solo cups. A man approached us on cross country skis. Another joked with us before riding off on a surfboard tied to the back of a golfcart (golfcart boogieboarding was rampant for days, and Danyelle and I saw a couple kids take hard spills that luckily ended with tears rather than bloodletting or broken bones). For the grown-ups, the snow seemed to carry a signal to capitulate to hedonistic impulses.
The dogs had their fun too, of course. They ran off leash through the park and bounded through the streets after tennis balls. Sammy was largely prohibited from such indulgence owing to her proclivity for digging for moles and running into open garages to mine for cat food. While Danyelle and I were recovering from norovirus, she’d expressed her boredom and disgust with her abbreviated walk schedule via long periods of staring, the occasional irrepressible whine, and many heavy, exasperated sighs. Snowbound (I thought) in the backyard, she released some of her pent-up energy on Thursday, when, finding the back gate open, she lit out and sprinted around the neighborhood eating the carrots off snowmen’s faces. For her, the snow was cold, hard opportunity.
Nursing a sore tummy, fatigued from a wretched bout with norovirus, I viewed our rare wintry visitor as a welcome reprieve from the everyday demands of the kids’ school schedule and the swimming pool, and as a lovely sight on the other side of the picture window in the living room; however, as I regained strength and longed to get out of the house, the snow and ice became a hindrance, a nuisance that I was ready to see gone. I was not alone in this mindset. Tiptoeing around the icy patches on Friday, no longer were the streets home to revelers bearing solo cups of liquid mirth; those had been replaced by drivers going too fast, apparently eager to get back to their former lives. The gangs of kids were absent too, driven in from exhaustion and cold; as Cartter put it, “I’m kind of glad there’s still snow, but I’m kind of ready to be done.” The dogs who had roamed freely were nowhere to be seen either, all of them I assume, like Sammy, eager for the thaw so that their masters would reattach them to their leashes and resume their regular walks. After a three-day pause in lowcountry life’s rhythm, everyone seemed to agree: time to get on with it already. Go roast on an open fire, Jack Frost. See you again some other random time.
The Raging Elitist 