When I was on the verge of my teenage years, my family moved to a mountainous community. Every winter, we were hip-deep in snow, and the roads were atrocious. As a driving teen, I cursed the snow each winter and wished it would just go away.
Then I grew up, got married, and moved to the Seattle, Washington area. It rains there. A lot. But it doesn’t often snow. I’m okay with the rain. In fact, I love it. I have fair skin, sensitive eyes, and I’d rather be too cold than too hot. All strikes against me living in the desert. So, I really enjoyed the gentle rains of Seattle. But after our first winter there, an interesting thing happened: I began to realize that I missed the snow.
Gak! What? I hate snow! (Or so I thought.)
I guess you don’t really appreciate something until you lose it. (Isn’t there a song about that somewhere? Maybe more than one.)
Now my family is back to living in snow country, though not the mountainous area where I grew up. It’s the high desert of the American southwest. Down here, if we don’t get snow, we don’t have enough water to keep our grass alive in the summer, so my love affair with snow has taken on an additional facet. Now, I desperately need it to snow, because I really like green grass.
So, when the white stuff starts to fall from the sky, I no longer moan and groan (even when I have to drive in it, although I’m not so keen on snow when I can’t huddle by the fireplace drinking hot chocolate all day). Instead, I find myself doing a little happy dance and looking forward to making a snow man with my kids, or maybe a snow dragon, if the skies bless us enough.
Weird, how you can grow to love something you used to hate. I guess it’s all in the way you look at things.