Every time I look out the window, the snow seems like it's really intense. Then I look again an hour later, and it's even more intense. This storm, apparently, is the real deal. Forecasts call for somewhere in the range of 15-20" by the time we're done, which would make the top ten snowfalls in Baltimore history. And it has me thinking about various things snow-related. This year, snow has taken on a different valance, because we just don't know where we'll be living this time next year. Our map of possible jobs is beginning to narrow as we move into interview season, but it still spans a rather broad geography. Some jobs are in particularly snowy areas of the country, such as Upstate New York, interior Pennsylvania, or Maine. Others are in the Southeast, where there's little snow at all. Because it's hard to gauge right now how interested in us any individual school is, that leaves us random factors to think about when considering where we might move.
Like whether it snows.
Snow is beautiful, and makes the Christmas tree and Christmas music seem all the more appropriate (though I only remember one time that it actually snowed on Christmas Day ... thank God Santa Claus decided to re-stock the game shelf that year!). When I was in college, I loved it. Our campus looked picturesque, there were hired staff who cleaned all the walks, and I didn't own a car that needed to be cleaned. Now, from our window, we have a good view of much of the parking lot at our complex, and for a while this morning a whole bunch of kids were out playing. I hope Nicholas gets to experience that, because when you're a kid (if you let yourself be one), snow is just plain fun. Even just looking outside at the snow gets him excited, so I'm looking forward to the chance that next winter he'll get to go out and play. (There's over a foot of snow on the ground here, and he can't walk, so if we went out to "play," it would involve mostly putting him in the snow and watching him slowly vanish).
But when I look outside, I can see across the parking lot as our cars slowly disappear, and remember that at some point they need to be cleaned off, and the areas around them shoveled out. That makes me hope we get a garage if we live in the north, even though I don't relish the thought of having to shovel a front walk and a driveway. We'll just have to make sure we train Nicholas (and Cashew and Macadamia) to be more helpful than my brothers and I were when we were kids. And having our own house looks positively wonderful when I realized this morning that the person parked next to us was cleaning out the parking space by moving the snow in front of our tires rather than putting it on the grass just a few feet away. It didn't seem malicious, just unthinking, but it still rankles, and it's not usually a problem you'd have in your driveway.
Besides, not having snow means we've probably landed somewhere with a miserably hot and humid summer. And I'd probably take the snow, even though I might get outvoted one to one by Sarah.
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