I love snow days. I’d been longing for one ever since I started my new job, over two years ago. With each forecast of a possibility of snow, however remote, I’d get my hopes up. And not even one flake would come. Steve and I moved to North Carolina in December four years ago, quickly welcomed by the scene below and with profuse apologies from everyone we met. “I’m so sorry. It doesn’t usually snow like this,” they would say.

The fact is that we wanted it to snow. One of the reasons we left California is that we missed the seasons. Memories of waking early to huddle around the radio, listening for school closures, fed my soul like comfort foods in winter. When we’d hear our county called, my brother and I would bundle up and play outside for hours in powdery drifts with our dog, finally retreating to thaw out with hot cocoa in front of the fire. It just didn’t get any better than that.

After our intro, Steve and I expected that snow was a normal part of winter in the North Carolina foothills and that the apologies we heard were just some sort of Southern cultural thing. We didn’t believe them. Until the two winters of drought, that is.

After enduring arctic blast temperatures this month that put us colder than Antarctica, I’d given up on snow. That’s why Tuesday came as such a surprise, to me (and to the meterologists who predicted the snow would pass over our part of the state).

I drove home early the day the snow began to fall to see a strange sight:  pieces of our shower flying through the window. Workers were at our house, renovating our bathroom (another surprise that a contractor would ever respond more quickly than he said, until we realized his other jobs all involved installing roofs).  

Snow falling and showers flying. The odd juxtaposition made me laugh. But I got my long-anticipated snow day, and that’s all that mattered. Steve and I sat by our fireplace and sipped hot chocolate while frigid air poured in through our bathroom windows and the melody of power tools hummed in the background. Instead of playing in tall drifts with the dog we don’t have, we watched our cat make snow angels (his way of begging for a tummy rub) in one inch of the white stuff.

Life doesn’t always meet our expectations. Actually, it rarely does. But whether it’s good or difficult, it’s always an adventure.