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The most core memory I have of a ‘snow day’ would be all the way back to 2011 when Pittsburgh was covered in nearly a foot of snow. The night before school, my mom got the phone call from the school that we would get the day off the following day. My sister and I excitedly celebrated – as we usually would for a snow day – and went to bed eager to wake up to all the snow the next day. The first thing we had done when we woke up was put on tons of layers of clothes, then trudged our way out the door, and into the huge wall of snow. I remember there had been so much snow, that we were able to sit down in it and it would form a comfortable, and functioning, chair. Another thing that we typically had done was take cup fulls of snow back into the house, and mix it with whatever juice we had at the time to make slushies. Then after a couple of hours of becoming human icicles, we would make our way back inside to drink hot chocolate. Yet, due to the school adapting to the virtual synchronous days during the pandemic, no kid will ever be able to experience these types of core memories again.
Part of me is somewhat grateful for the adaptation to virtual days, just because the snow days won’t interfere with our spring break anymore. But then again, for those who are younger than me, it’s truly a sad situation because they will never come to know and love the snow days that we older students were fortunate enough to experience.
Just before I started to write this, my mom had let me know that tomorrow would be a virtual day due to the weather. Yes, it is nice to sleep in – being that virtual snow days function on a two-hour delay schedule – but I definitely miss the times when a snow day was a day off. If anything, these virtual days give me flashbacks to last year, when day after day I would sit at my desk for hours for school. So it’s definitely not the same eager feeling that I would’ve got a few years ago after hearing the news.
