I was excited to experience a Boston winter – being in snow country was a genuine attraction of our trip here – and last week looked set to deliver. The headlines were threatening me with a good time (“predicted to be heaviest snowfall in two years” and pre-emptive school closures ran in ticker tape across the TV screen). Cars started sporting snowplough attachments, and the yoga teacher ended class not with namaste but with an ominous: “Good luck with the storm.”
My husband and I were giddy as toddlers. Would there be six inches of snow? Twelve? “When I wake up at 4am,” my husband said gleefully, studying his weather app, “it should already be white.” At the shop he asked, in all seriousness, if we should buy a sledge “before they all sell out”.
We were hoping for the snow of our childhood. I was last snowed in when I was still in primary school and the last time I experienced snow heavy enough to bring that otherworldly hush was January 2009 (I know, because I had a new puppy and spent hours outside in the snow, encouraging him to pee). The climate catastrophe has made snow an out-of-reach luxury for many, something you have to get on a plane to see (thereby decreasing the chances of snow further by contributing to global heating). It feel like there’s an outbreak of no-snow triggered solastalgia : a realisation we’ve lost something irreplacable, magical.
By the evening, meteorologists were backtracking dramatically; the storm had changed direction; predictions were downgraded. We went to bed still unsure what to expect, but squinting outside at 4am without my glasses, the blurry ground looked brown. By mid-morning, something was falling from the sky, but it was dismally familiar: drizzle. “I can get this in York!” I texted my son, angrily. We watched all day, on and off, still hopeful, and were eventually rewarded with a few desultory flurries. By evening it was over, leaving the scantest dusting. “A complete snow day bust,” the local paper reported. The lady in the diner said everyone was relieved; everyone but us.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
