I don’t love snow, but I don’t hate the first few flakes either. It’s fun for kids to sled and play, and it’s cozy to sit inside under a blanket by the fire. I love how the fresh snow sparkles like a blanket of glitter in the sunlight, and how its soft glow lights up the otherwise dark night.
For now, it’s beautiful.
As I sit here during our second two-hour school delay of the week, I’m reminded that this is someone’s first time driving in the snow.
Maybe it’s a sixteen-year-old with a brand-new license or someone who just moved here from a sunny state.
I remember being that sixteen-year-old.
I was terrified of driving in the snow when I first got my license. If it was snowing, I would ask a friend for a ride to school. If I had somewhere to go and the roads weren’t perfect, I’d ask someone to drop me off.
I wanted nothing to do with it.
I still remember the first time I slid on ice while I was learning to drive. I hit the brakes and the car didn’t stop. It just kept sliding.
That feeling of having absolutely no control over where the car was going terrified me.
There were all these things I was supposed to remember about what to do when a car starts sliding. Don’t slam on the brakes. Steer the right way. Stay calm.
Staying calm was definitely not my first instinct.
For a long time, my winter-driving strategy was mostly to avoid winter driving.
Then I graduated from college, got my first apartment and started working full time.
Suddenly, asking someone else for a ride every time it snowed wasn’t really an option. I had a job to get to whether the roads were perfect or not.
My first apartment also taught me another winter lesson I’d somehow managed to avoid.
Growing up, I parked in my parents’ garage. I had never really thought about what a luxury that was until the first winter morning I walked outside my apartment and found my car covered in snow and ice.
Of course, I hadn’t planned extra time to clean it off.
I scraped. I brushed. I froze.
When I got home that day, I rented a carport.
Some winter lessons only need to be learned once.
Over time, though, I got better at all of it.
I learned that snow can be beautiful and still make the roads terrible. Ice is worse. Black ice is even worse than that. And packed-down snow that looks perfectly manageable can be surprisingly slick.
I learned to give myself more time and more room.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped being the teenager asking someone else for a ride and became someone who knows how to drive in a Midwestern winter.
I still don’t like it.
That feeling when the tires lose traction and the car starts to slide still makes my stomach drop. I’m not sure I’ll ever become comfortable with that.
But I can handle it now.
And I’m actually kind of proud of that.
In a few months, I’ll be completely over winter. The snow will be gray, the parking-lot piles will be enormous, and I’ll be counting the days until spring.
But for now, it’s still the first snow.
It’s beautiful outside. My daughter gets a two-hour delay. And somewhere nearby, someone is probably gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly while learning one of those strange Midwestern skills they’ll eventually stop thinking about.
I remember exactly how that feels.
Ope. Welcome to winter.
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