Rick Alexander asks: Snow or NO?????

Snow or no?

February 2020 is in it’s last week and we still have not had any meaningful snowfall this winter. So, is that good or bad? If you are a skier or snowboarder, the answer is obvious. But what about the rest of us?

I’ve lived my entire life in the Northeast and have seen both sides of the snow coin, the feast and the famine. I’ve always been a fan of snow, even though I don’t ski. I don’t own a snow blower, I’d rather shovel it myself.  I live less than four miles from where I work, so I can get there in almost any conditions. I might sing a different tune if I had a longer driveway and more walksways to shovel or had to drive from Hagerstown over South Mountain to Frederick every day during a snowy winter.

Sometimes I have to ask myself, do I like snow or just the “idea” of snow? That’s probably a good question for all of us to ask ……. about everything! I think many of us attend events, eat at restaurants, go to vacation spots or do certain things, sometimes over and over, because we like the idea of doing so more than the actual doing. I think this is because when our initial impression of something is good, we can tend to hang on to it rather than update it to reality. Or over the course of time a more recent less than stellar experience we had somehow mellows into “it’s not so bad, actually kinda good, let’s go back and do it again”. To describe these experiences I use the phrase “it looks good on paper” . Sometimes we just want to like something more than we actually do. You’ll see this kind of thought expressed when a restaurant that’s been open for years, closes. Most times they shut down because they simply are no longer any good and maybe have not been for some time. But you’ll see pages and pages of social media posts from folks, many of whom haven’t visited it in years, sadly lamenting the closure. I often think, with this many people sad, why isn’t the restaurant still open? More than likely, the majority of posters want to like it. They still love the concept of this eating establishment, although the actual experience may not be so good! I’m beginning to wonder if  maybe snow, for me, falls in that category.

One thing I’ve noticed is with the lack of snow and milder temperatures, the winter seems longer, not shorter, to me. Isn’t that strange? I guess it feels like it should be March already, not still February! And we haven’t had the excitement of a big winter storm to break up the tedium of the season. Wait….maybe I do like snow? I’ll let you know after March.