“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.”
—Carl Reiner

A wee-hours snowstorm canceled our plans for the morning, much to the girls’ satisfaction. They’ve been waiting for weeks to try out the new sleds Scott hid in the garage, the ones they aren’t supposed to know about. (Sorry, honey—I left the garage door open one day. Oops.) Upstairs in their room an indoor blizzard is raging: mittens flying, long underwear leaping out of the drawer, layer upon layer of clothing sailing through the air en route to its exuberant young owners.

Myself, I’ve always been of the Carl Reiner school of thought when it comes to snowstorms. To me, snow is: an inconvenience, an excuse to drink hot chocolate, and a once useful but now overused basis for metaphor (in that order).

But the children of my best pal, Alice Gunther, recently gave challenge to my admittedly cantankerous point of view. Alice, inspired by Julie Bogart’s The Writer’s Jungle, asked her girls how they would describe snow to someone who had never seen it before. With Alice’s permission, I reprint parts of their descriptions here:

B (age 5) “Snow feels like a cut when it gets into your boots.”
“It is white as white paper.”

C (age 7) “Snow looks like a cluster of diamonds from a fairy tale. If you leave velvet out in the snow, you will find it covered with little snowflakes, and the points look like Celtic knots. Each one is different from the others, yet they could fit together like a mosaic or a flower. Snow looks like lace on the velvet, like a queen’s dress.”

M (age 9) “Snow feels like a very cold chick—a chick with hypothermia.”
“When you step on it, it sounds like baked taco shells.”

A (age 11) “Snow looks like frosting on a cake, with jagged peaks here and there, although it is soft in most places. Where you have walked, it is flat, and greenish brown grass peaks out. As you look ahead of you, all the ground in front of you is level and very wide, almost like a flat plain. If you pick up a scoop in your gloved hand and look closely at it, it seems to have tiny craters, almost like a sponge.”

Wow. These breathtaking bits of freewriting almost make me want to go dig up my own long underwear and venture out to see the stuff firsthand.

Almost. I think instead I’ll curl up with the aforementioned mug of hot chocolate and a copy of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” I’ll have to read it to myself, though. The kids are all outside.

To read Alice’s Writer’s Jungle review in its entirety, visit the Bravewriter discussion in the “Living Language Arts” forum at 4 Real Learning.

When I was setting up this blog, I created a category called “Things that Inspire Me” with Small Meadow Press in mind, but I haven’t had a chance to post about it until now. This is due in part to my urge to gush for pages about Lesley Austin’s beautiful notecards and illustrated quotations—I keep drafting posts that turn into novels. And really, I don’t need to say anything at all: Lesley’s lovely offerings speak for themselves. Her new “Notes on Gratitude,” with quotations from Shakespeare, Chesterton, and others, have got me looking forward to every opportunity to write thank-you notes, so delightful are they. I ordered her “Jane Austen Missives” stationery set to give to my niece for Christmas, and once I had it in my hands, I had to get quite stern with myself in order to give it up. I plan to tuck one of Lesley’s charmingly named “Small Useful Books” into my daughters’ Easter baskets—they’ll be perfect for our nature walks this spring.

See, I’m doing it again! I can’t help it! And I haven’t even gotten to the so-perfect-it’s-uncanny illustrated quotation I ordered in honor of Scott. (“What a dreadful thing it must be to have a dull father,” by Mary Mapes Dodge—accompanied by a sepia-toned picture that makes my girls, whose father is anything but dull, grin every time they glance at it.) I’ll stop now and let you see for yourself.