t was more snow than I’d seen in my entire life, and apparently I wasn’t alone. According to this morning’s New York Times, “A total of 26.9 inches fell in Central Park, the most since record-keeping began in 1869.” Cars along my street were buried, nothing but big white mounds, and in certain places, where they hadn’t shoveled a path, I could probably sink up to my stomach. Not that I would do that--at least, not in these pants. The snow kept coming, too—driving in hard and diagonally, or lingering in the breeze like it does in the movies. I perched the cat in the windowsill and showed him how the whole city had transformed. “Isn’t it amazing?” I asked him. He meowed loudly for me to put him down. Unless it’s raining wet food, he really doesn’t care.

Texas gets its share of snow and ice every three years or so, and the place shuts down like a prison on high-alert. As a kid, this was brilliant, because it meant school might be cancelled, and once, when it wasn’t, my East-Coast mother decided her poor kids deserved to play in the snow and let us stay home. My brother and I still refer to this as Best Day Ever. In my senior year of college, my friends and I came back from Christmas Break to experience “Artic Blast 1996,” postponing the start of school—and thus prolonging our black-out binge drinking—for two sweet days. We rode down hills on the lids of garbage cans. We had movie marathons. In what must have seemed like college-kid heaven, we refrigerated our beer outside.

I must admit, I missed having playmates yesterday. But in true New York fashion, there wasn’t much play going on. All the bodegas and restaurants were open, and the landlords kept busy shoveling the sidewalk in what must have felt like the world’s most futile gesture. I walked around the block sticking my hand into piles to see how far I could reach and running my hand along every pristine pile. Snow: It’s so weird. Should I be less impressed? A little girl swallowed inside a purple coast made a snowball and pummeled it to the ground. Then she leapt into the nearest snowdrift. “Snooow!” she said. Which is exactly what I was thinking.