maybe i'm crazy....

Last weekend I was in Huntsville, where it was warm enough not to need a jacket most of the time - around 60-70 and mostly sunny.  It was refreshing, and I enjoyed the warmer weather and the blooming buttercups and forsythia and seeing the buds on the trees.  Then I came back to Chicago, where it's been a chilly week, but not downright cold.  I've found that when the sun is out, 30 here feels quite nice as long as the wind isn't howling.

It makes sense that I would be yearning for the Spring-like weather I'm accustomed to this time of year in the South.  It makes sense that I would have had my fill of gray skies and below-freezing temperatures.  It doesn't make sense that, as I sit here on a Saturday morning watching snow flurries drift and blow and fly around as though they're having fun, I would think it's a beautiful day.

Maybe it's the novelty of snow; the years I've spent wishing it would snow, the miracle of teensy ice crystals falling from the sky and covering everything with a blanket of pure white, the beauty of big fluffy chunks drifting down silently, like cotton from the heavens.  Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't mind that I'm seeing snow today instead of the 70-degree weather I would be enjoying if I were in Alabama.  I'm almost sad that Spring is around the corner, and there will be no more snow until next winter.  Maybe there's an Eskimo somewhere in my family tree, but as much as I love sun and blooms and birds singing and smelling that first cut of green grass, I love snow.

Yes, there's been plenty of the white stuff down home this year - the year that I'm not there to enjoy it.  And yes, it will be 10 more years before it happens again, unless we have an anomaly like the early 90's when it snowed 8" and 2 years later snowed almost a foot.  Or the other way around - at that depth, a bunch of snow is a bunch of snow.  But as it hadn't snowed more than an inch or two in the past 10 years in Huntsville, I was looking forward to living in a place where snow is a certainty.  And I've not been disappointed in the amount that Chicago-land has seen since November.  I just think I could do with one more good one.  I would go down to the park by the river and make a snow angel.  And a snow man.  And bring a bowl back home for snow cream.  Because those are the things I've not done this winter, even with the 20" snow last month.

Of course, like Dustin said on Facebook, if I had made a snow angel then, they might not have found me until summer.  :)