Let It Snow

Yesterday, on the Winter Solstice, I discovered what my son Gregory assures me that "everybody knows": if you go to Google and type in "let it snow," some pretty delightful things begin to happen on your computer screen. (And then I discovered something else that "everybody knows": fun things also happen if you go to Google and type in "do a barrel roll.")

In any case, no sooner had I Googled "let it snow" than it did indeed begin to snow: such thick heavy flakes that I had to put the car in the garage all covered with snow because it was snowing faster than I could brush it off. This morning there is at least a foot out there, and it's still snowing. The university is closed. My friend Carol and I decided to cancel our breakfast date at Lucile's, rescheduling it for next week.

The sudden joy I felt upon canceling the long-awaited, extremely fun breakfast date made me remember something I realized once years ago: there is nothing in my life that I'm looking forward to so much that I wouldn't prefer having it be canceled.

I wonder why this is, and what it means. Partly it's just that it's such a gift to be delivered an unexpected, unscheduled block of time: Here is this extra hour, here is this extra morning, make of it something magical. Part of it is that I might just be an over-scheduled person, and this is a signal to myself that I should restructure my life so that it has more down time in it, time for what Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write) calls "moodling."

I still want to go to all the Christmas activities coming up at church, and one more Hanukkah party of the three I'm attending this season, plus the rescheduled Lucile's breakfast (yum!). But right now I'm loving sitting here puttering at my computer (though I am NOT going to spend this gift of a morning doing email!), and listening to laundry thumping around in the dryer - thinking about baking the yeast-rising cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning - thinking about maybe even making some notes for a new book - and just looking out my window watching the snow as it keeps falling.