Remember Snow?

When I was a kid, it was guaranteed we would get at the very least one good school-closing snowfall a year. It was like a bonus holiday, where all the neighborhood kids would come out for snowball fights, sledding, and maple-syrup snow cones. The snow was always gone in a day or two, leaving a few sad-looking snowmen to wither away into green lawns, but there was always the promise of next year.

In 1980, when I was 7, we had two record snowfalls, 12.4 inches in February and then 13.7 inches a month later. The snowdrifts were so huge, we made forts out of them that towered over the cars in our apartment complex’s parking lot. In February of 1989 we got 15.4 inches, but then I was 16 and snow was just a nuisance that kept me from exercising my newfound driving privileges.

In my last seven years of living here, I’ve gotten maybe two days off of work for snow, but I paid it no mind. It was only when I actively started looking for that yearly snowfall that I realized it was missing. It didn’t snow at all this last year, and it only snowed once the year before that, and that all melted away in just a few hours. I remember that, because I went outside to film my cats’ reaction to the alien landscape, but by the time I got my camera set up, the snow was gone.

Droop Credit: caldecott_rose

When I mention this absence of snow to my friends, they say there’s never been much snow in this area and that I’m making a big deal out of nothing. So why do I remember snow being a yearly event in my childhood? I have the photographs of my siblings and I playing in more than a foot of snow as children, evidence that I’m not imagining this.

I also have the climate record. Between 1990 and 2006 the National Arbor Day Foundation shifted the U.S. Hardiness Zones, the zones where different species of plants thrive, northward. I grew up in Zone 7 as a kid, but when I moved back to my hometown after college, it had become Zone 8.

Nobody living here noticed that it had stopped snowing. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond referred to this phenomenon as “Landscape Amnesia,” we don’t remember the past in the setting in which it took place, but recreate it in the landscape we live in currently. That’s why we have to trust the temperature records and not our fallible memories.

It’s not fair that my kids won’t have snow days, unplanned vacations where the whole neighborhood comes out for snowball fights and snowmen, and to retire to warm dry clothes and hot chocolate at the end of the day. It’s not fair they’ll have to learn about it from my childhood photo albums.