Our first snowman
It's been snowing and getting very cold on Long Island recently, at least by my standards. Even the locals say that this is the worst winter since the 1930s, and one day we even reached a temperature lower than the area has experienced since 1911 (2° F, I think, which I assume is somewhere around -50° C). It is certainly the worst winter since 2000, the year my wife and I moved here.
Compared to other places in the world, even compared to other places in the United States, and even compared to other places in New York, that's not really all that cold. Anyone from Minnesota or North Dakota who's reading this right now is rolling their eyes and wishing they could be as warm as 2°. But I grew up in Texas, where we had a two-day-long ice storm every other year to break up the winter days that averaged about 60° (um, 18° C? I really don't know).
We moved here in September of 2000, expecting to see lots of snow simply because New York is "up north," and all the snow goes "up north." The weather didn't disappoint us, giving us at least three good snowfalls, none of which melted until March. Our neighbors told us it was an unusually cold and snowy winter, but we didn't mind. We just enjoyed it.
One lightly snowy day, we trekked down to a nearby park and built a snowman. Mrs. Happy was 26 years old at the time, and it was the first snowman she built since she was six years old. It was the first I had been able to build since my junior year in high school. While other people were cursing the slippery roads, worrying about the cost of heating fuel, and grumblingly shoveling their driveways and sidewalks, we were playing like a couple of kids, wrestling in the snow, throwing snowballs at each other, and fashioning a make-believe person out of a few million snowflakes, a couple of twigs, some buttons, a scarf, and a carrot. Some people hate snow, and some love it. We love it.
