Snow day...

More like a No Day.

I'm trying to be positive about LA but dangit why does the first big snow storm in YEARS have to happen the one winter I am away from the Northwest? My daughter's first winter?

Sure, it's cold here. It's even so cold I can finally wear socks with my shoes, and gloves on my hands. We even have the heaters on. But I miss the snow. Everybody I talk to tells me about the snow! the snow! the magical beautiful wondrous snow! I am getting jealous. I am worried that it may never snow again. My daughter will have missed her one chance to experience snow because we made the dumb choice to live in LA for a little while...just long enough to miss all the good stuff.

Ugh. Gotta stop thinking this way. There is a Ray Bradbury story which has haunted me ever since I read it long long long ago. I think we even saw a made-for-tv adaptation of it in Mrs. Cotton's fourth grade class. It's awful. It takes place in an elementary school on Venus, where it rains ALL THE TIME. The children have to take daily treatments of artificial sunlight to avoid rickets or jaundice or whatever diseases spring from having no vitamin D in the body. The thing about Venus is that the sun only comes out once every 7 years, for just a few hours. None of these kids are old enough to remember what the sun is like, except for one girl who moved to Venus from Earth more recently, and can therefore remember the sunlight. She talks about it to no end, and it really pisses the other children off. They think she's bragging, or making it up. So they play a cruel trick on her. They lock her in a closet on the day the sun is supposed to come out, just for a minute. They just want to scare her a little bit, but then the sun comes out and they all get distracted and run outside to play. In the TV program, suddenly blooming flowers surround happy, laughing children as they run through green fields in the sunshine, then cut away to a girl screaming and pounding on the door to be let out, then back to the happy laughing children, until the sun goes behind a cloud, a thunderclap claps, and all the children then remember their classmate, locked away, and they run to let her out but it is too late.

She is broken when they open the door. Seven more years of rain.

So yeah, I can be overdramatic about things, certainly. Sure, it'll probably snow again next year, and maybe it will even stick. If we're lucky, it might even snow when we come up in January for Edie's birthday. But I can hear you all up there, laughing and throwing snowballs and cozying up under blankets by the fire. I see your pictures, of your loved little ones all bundled up for their first big snow day. Meanwhile, we'll put on our sunglasses and drive to the beach to catch some chilly rays of sunlight...just because we can. We probably won't even need scarves. How about THAT, Seattle, Portland, and New York? There's still leaves on our trees!