A couple of months ago I made a “snow songs” playlist. 

I’m doing a radio show every week on WYXR, the new community station in which The Daily Memphian is a partner, and I’ve given myself the challenge of constructing each show around a theme. Sometimes that’s a specific year. But usually it’s a mix of songs about a certain subject: The “Play a Train Song Show” or the “Give ’Em a Great Big Kiss Show,” for instance. 

I try to plan shows a couple of weeks ahead, but decided to work up a “Snow Day Show” to have in my back pocket, just in case we actually had one, which seemed increasingly unlikely. 

Joke’s on me: We had so much snow it shuttered the studio, canceling my “Snow Day Show.”

That’s not my biggest snow-week bummer. My real one is more mundane and similarly low-stakes, all things considered: A burst pipe in the laundry room that had me shoveling through snow looking for the curb stop to shut the water off before the house got flooded. I’m sure scores – if not hundreds – of Memphians, including at least two of my co-workers, had a similar experience. We discovered that the laundry room in our 80-year-old Midtown house had literally zero insulation, but the repair was more minor than we’d feared. 

Many more Memphians have had real reasons to curse this week, officially declared a state of emergency. Two warming centers were opened. COVID vaccinations were postponed. The water situation got precarious. Speaking of which, on our day without water, I drove the kids out east to my parents’ house. Poplar was clear, but we saw at least half a dozen cars stuck on side streets, wheels spinning. There but for the grace of God…. 

Yesterday I texted a friend in Minnesota a photo of a very atypical Memphis dog walk through my sudden tundra of a neighborhood. Turns out he had just taken his pup on a similar-looking stroll, in his case a fully typical February day. 

He thought I was complaining: “Be happy you’re not in Texas, I guess.”

But I wasn’t. I come not to bury the snow – the snow’s done the burying this week – but to praise it. 

This has been the rare, perfect Memphis winter – hard but short. Typically we get electricity-felling ice, melt-on-contact flurries or nothing at all. Not this gorgeous avalanche of fluffy white. Savor the final day or so of it before it melts into a mess. 

So here’s to the sledding and the ingenuity it inspires among the majority of Memphians without an actual snow sled hanging in their garage. 

Every neighborhood has its choice hill. I’ve seen a video of my brother land-kayaking down a Shelby Farms incline and my friend Jessica Benson, of Grind City Media, literally skiing Beale Street landing. 

Over at the Levitt Shell in Overton Park, our neighborhood slope, I saw laundry baskets and plastic bin tops, beach boogie boards, cardboard TV boxes and one laminated political yard sign. (Thanks, Jim Kyle.)

We used a big hard-plastic disc intended as a Christmas Tree base. A seasonal multi-tasker, it turns out. 

I’ve seen, on social media, someone in Memphis sledding on a guitar case pulled by a car (a bad idea, maybe?) and, in person, someone pulled on a sled by their dog. Barbecue fest got canceled, but we’re up for the Iditarod.

Here’s to the snow cream, a childhood memory jogged by Jennifer Biggs. My Minnesota-raised wife had never heard of such a thing. Perhaps snow cream is for when snow is a special occasion, not a constantly renewed winter resource. I remember my mother making it with sweetened condensed milk. Lacking that in the cupboard, we did heavy cream and powdered sugar, keeping the bowl out on the deck to stay cold. As this is written, my son is concocting a second batch, solo.

Here’s to the iced-over trees that began our winter week, especially since it seems like not many came down over electric lines. We got the eerie beauty without much of the damage.

Here’s to the giant icicles forming from gutters and awnings, giving neighborhood strolls a beyond-the-Wall “Game of Thrones” vibe.

Here’s to how looking out the window felt like peering into a snow globe and stepping out your door felt like stepping into one.

Here’s to walking, with or without the dog. 

One of the funniest local moments this week had to be when the good folks at Bike/Ped Memphis tweeted out a helpful reminder that “per City ordinance property owners have the responsibility to clear their adjacent sidewalks of snow and ice.” 

Truly, bless their hearts. 

Technically speaking, this isn’t wrong. My late father-in-law, a lifelong Minnesotan and a structural engineer prone to tidiness, was assiduous about his shoveling. You clear it up soon before it piles up too much or freezes over. This is a necessity of living with the snow. In Memphis, even this week, we know we aren’t living with it long. 

I did actually shovel off my stoop in deference to the mailman, but I haven’t seen a single shoveled sidewalk, which has made the dog walks more of an adventure. She’s been galloping. I’ve been clomping. We’ve managed to stay upright so far. 

Here’s to the peace and quiet, especially at night. This is really the best thing about a good snow, and one I’d sort of forgotten. 

One of the songs from my aborted “Snow Day Show” is “Winter Storm ’98,” by the short-lived late-’90s indie trio Cadallaca. It’s sort of a song about romantic distress, but this line has been in my head this week: “Why can’t we walk, just walk around?/There are no cars, there is no sound.”

But it’s not just fewer cars and less activity. The snow itself absorbs sound, creating a muffling effect. Single-digit temps are no fun, but if you bundle properly, a 20-degree walk in the snow, especially past dusk, is the prettiest, most peaceful walk you will have. 

I grew up in Arkansas and Memphis and spent five years, from ages 18 to 22, in Minnesota. I do not miss the Minnesota winters. 

I don’t miss 15 inches of snow the week before Halloween, negative 85-degree wind chill or snow coming down so hard that it breaks your windshield wipers while you’re driving to work in a blizzard because a blizzard’s no reason to close a bookstore, right? These are all extreme examples and all actual things I experienced. 

I don’t miss winter lasting five months or the weeks-long lingering dirty slush after a storm. 

But having all four seasons is nice. An honest-to-goodness snow storm of the kind we almost never get is an experience and memory I’m glad this generation of Memphis kids will have. 

So, while not all will raise a mug of hot cocoa to this toast, here’s to this short, hard-but-not-brutal, real winter. May you return next year.