Snow Day

Snow has a romantic quality to me. It makes me want to snuggle on the couch, under the arm of my husband, wrapped in a quilt. So when I woke yesterday morning to a white blanket over the yard, I was thrilled…except for the fact that I woke up to an empty house. Kyle had flown to Michigan on a business trip and there was no one to help celebrate the new fallen snow.

I felt so lonely.

Snow makes me really homesick. As both of my parents were school teachers, they were always home with us when there was a "snow day" at school. Our house usually was full of neighborhood kids by noon. Between sledding and snowball fights, mom would dry our snow-sopped clothes in the dryer and we would gobble down big bowls of homemade vegetable beef soup.

My mother would always start a new jigsaw puzzle that had a gazillion pieces and filled up the entire dining room table. But, the table in the kitchen is where all the action happened. Hours of games were played….Life, Trumpet, Skip-Bo, Dominoes, Pictionary, Phase 10 and too many others to count. Between games, we would wander into the dining room and put a few pieces in Mom's puzzle. It was always a contest to see who would get to put in the last piece. There was always a missing piece that, by some miraculous act of God, my brother always found in his pocket. He hates to lose.

We would huddle around the television to watch the ten o'clock news, silently praying that school would be called off the next day. When our prayers were answered, the floor would fill up with sleeping bags, so we could do it all again the next day.

So, as I looked out my front door at the first snow of the year, my heart broke a little bit. I missed my family and childhood friends and innocence and vegetable soup. But last night, as I snuggled under the arm of my husband, I knew that no matter how far away he was that morning, I shouldn't have been lonely…because he is the last piece to my puzzle.