Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

This is a much said phrase by kids who live in the South. Every kid wants to use up those far and few snow days to get out of school. Most of us in this area can probably count on two hands the amount of times a significant amount of snow was on the ground in Louisiana.

The snow days when I remember having the most fun go back to the 70s and 80s. Do you remember the year the Red River froze over? I also remember a pretty good one in the mid 70s while I was still going to MHS. That gave me the perfect chance to test my driving abilities in the snow. It also gave a few others whose names I’m choosing not to disclose the chance to show their superior driving skills by their ability to cut donuts out at Caney Lake in the middle of the night in all that snow! I believe the car was a black 1974 or 75 Grand Prix. For those who can remember back that far, you probably can figure out who that person is. Hint: his wife is a dental hygienist named Gay. When you are young, you are fearless, and I think my generation was very much into believing that we were indestructible.

I have a few other memories of first snows when I was very young. I made a snowman with my daddy in our front yard one year, but then the yard looked ugly with big snowball tracks all in it. I didn’t like that. When you don’t get a lot of snow, you get down to the grass pretty quick with your snowballs. I also remember the smaller Louisiana versions of snowmen. You know the ones you make on the hood of the car because the snow didn’t stick on the ground! Those little hood ornament snowmen rode all over town until that motor heated up the hood. At the first red-light you came to, off he slid onto the road!

Snow when you are a kid is the best kind of snow even if you don’t get much. In Louisiana you never saw a sled, so you always ***made due*** with what you had. What we had was a 30-foot steep driveway. We would sit in our white enamel dishpan and slide down the hill, while Daddy stood at the bottom to keep a car from hitting you. Later we would advance to a car hood behind a four wheeler which is not too smart. We also used to get a big piece of plastic and take it over by the high school track field and slide down the big hill. Or we would go to East Todd Street and slide down that hill on a flat piece of cardboard. You used whatever you could find when you were a kid or even a teenager back then. I later would acquire a sled just in case; I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to use it. I think I may have gotten it out once in the last 15 years!

When you get older, you tend to not want it to snow because people in Louisiana don’t know how to drive in bad weather, especially snow and ice. I hope I never get too old to not want it to snow. So my wish for this winter is LET IT SNOW!