White Piles: The Snow Outside Our Windows

“Nebraska snow just hits different.”

I imagined that is what the kids would say, but I felt about 107 years old when I said it out loud to my son, my voice muffled by the frosted confetti that wouldn’t stop spilling out of the low-slung, granite clouds over our heads.

I felt so old, the moment I tried to go full #TikTokDad, that you might have expected to see me tossing a giant jewel off the back of a boat in a movie about true love and the safety precautions of the cruise ship industry in 1912.

To his credit, he just kind of shrugged me off and did a full-on, recklessly unchecked, swandive into a four-foot eleven-inch snow pile; the mound that was from the first of three shoveling sessions I would endure that day.

He faceplanted with such joyous gusto, crash landing in the glistening foothill we had created with plastic heaves of our bulging shovel, that my neck hurt from the impact just watching him.

Stoned to the gills on fistfuls of ibuprofen, the snowshoveler’s drug of choice in the middle Midwest, I gleefully laughed at my own joke and thrust my shovel once more into the pavement, the plastic blade doing a little bump ’n’ grind with my driveway; the least sexy that dance has ever looked.

It’s these little moments — these frostbitten snippets of gallows humor murmured into the zipper of a high-and-tight coat, or set free from chill lips like an apparition of shitty humor — floating skyward into the static of snowflakes all around us, that make shoveling in Nebraska in the middle of January okay.

Better than okay, really.

It’s looking over and seeing my two children buried in rolling hills of snow. It’s that crisp, scaldingly cold air that slips into your lungs right when you’re laughing hysterically at your kids’ suicide charge down a hill in a plastic sled that only narrowly averted utter catastrophe and makes you cough and cackle like a pair of virgin lungs hitting a lit Marlboro Red.

Turns out, Nebraska snow does hit different.

And, in 2021? I’m just glad I’m alive to see it hit at all.