Very often, in the process of restoring an older house, you run into things that you weren’t expecting. You have to re-think, adjust, change your plans. There can be an awful lot of “now what?” moments. Those are the times that you can either choose to get upset that things aren’t going the way you want them to, or get creative and see them as an opportunity to come up with something new and different.
As teachers in the Missouri Ozarks, snow days are the reality we live with nearly every winter. Snow days interrupt the normal flow of life, and while kids almost universally hope and pray for snow days, teachers and parents don’t always share their sentiments. For a kid, the future is this afternoon, or tomorrow. They don’t look much beyond that, and any day out of school is a good day as far as they are concerned.
For me, snow days have not been very well received in the past. The way I looked at it was this: My lesson plans were going to get off track, and we were going to have a day off when the weather was terrible, thus having to give up a spring holiday when the weather probably would have been nice. Worst case scenario was that we would have to tack make-up days on to the end of the school year, so summer vacation would be shortened.
This last winter, we had an especially high number of snow days, so much so that all of the above happened. An interest thing happened, though. My wife and I were in a completely different place in our relationship than we had ever been before during a winter. Our nest was empty, so we didn’t have the kids to figure out what to do with, and we were very much in the honeymoon stage of back togetherness. I still didn’t want to have to lose holidays or go to school longer than we were scheduled to, but these snow days came in a different flavor than the ones from past years.
This year’s snow days were an opportunity to stay in the warmth of the loft and watch the storm through the windows. They were times for cooking together, making hot chocolate, movie marathons, building jigsaw puzzles, and lots of cuddling. Since we live downtown, we would also brave the snow to walk to nearby places such as The Cup (a cupcake specialty shop), several nearby coffee shops, or the Bistro Market, our downtown grocery and bistro.
My fondest memory of last winter’s snow days was something that would never have even been a thought in previous years. My wife and I don’t watch TV. At all. We don’t have cable, satellite, or any type of television service. We’re just not interested. Somehow, though, our oldest daughter got us interested in the show Big Bang Theory.
She buys whole seasons of shows on DVD and she had three seasons worth of Big Bang Theory. She loaned us season one just to get us to try it. My wife liked it right away, and I came around to it after a few episodes. During the snow days last winter, we ended up going through all three seasons, cuddled up on our new couch and laughing together. It was entirely silly fun, but whenever I think about the old loft and last winter, those are some of the memories that are best and brightest.
The Restoration Tour 