Nothing but snow here today, gang!! Wow. I could not be happier! And the snow is not supposed to stop until much later tonight. So — Yay!!

A perfect day to stay in, get all cozy, and do nothing! Oops! I mean do rewrites!! hahaha. Well, whatever.  Today I have decided to do whatever the spirit moves me to do. I have made a secret pact with myself to BE HAPPY!!

And btw, that book pictured up there (& below) — Snow, by Roy McKie and P. D. Eastman — was one of my favorite books when I was a little girl in Cleveland; where all it did, all winter long, incidentally, was SNOW! Yippee ki yi yay!

(P. D. Eastman was the author/illustrator of many of my favorite books when I was really little: Go, Dog. Go! (notice the precise punctuation in that title, gang — doesn’t it just kill you?? Well, it does me, the self-same gal who is frequently wearing an editor’s hat.); A Fish Out of Water;  Robert the Rose Horse (although with a red cover in my day); and Are You My Mother?)

But Snow was one of those really early “I Can Read It All By Myself” books that helped you learn how to read. Well, sort of. What Snow did, really, was have really, really, really short sentences that were easy to memorize and recite by heart when you were only two, so it sort of seemed to innocent bystanders (or bysitters) as if you were reading, when in fact you were about six before you could even spell your own name because some brilliant older people who should have known better decided to give you a seven-letter name, like, Marilyn, instead of the mere four-letter name that they had given to your older brother, Adam, wherein two of those letters were exactly the same, so is it any wonder that he could spell a name like that when he was, say, six months old??

Okay, I digress!

Yes, I loved Cleveland. I loved growing up in Cleveland. I loved all that snow in Cleveland. I truly did.  I will never forget the very first time I became cognizant of snow.  I was probably around 2 and a half years old. It was early in the morning, my mother was already up and in the little kitchenette making breakfast. I got out of bed, went into our little playroom-type room, where Shari Lewis and Lambchop were already on the black & white TV set, and I was suddenly spellbound by the sight of all that white stuff falling all over everything outside! I jumped up onto the couch with my mouth hanging open, as I stared out the window. Then, shouting, I hurried into the kitchen to alert my mother, who calmly informed me that all that white stuff falling all over everything outside was “snow.”

Well, I was delighted by the development.  (Which is a good thing, since all it really does in Cleveland for most of the year is snow…)

We had a very small house in those days — a mid-1950s, California A-Frame style — on an unassuming cul-de-sac called Horizon Drive (if you open that link, you can get a street view of it on google and see for yourself that, while bearing a name as lofty, promising, and limitless as “Horizon Drive,” it is still rather unassuming — our house was all the way over on the south corner), but to me, it was paradise. Honestly. We had a big tree in the backyard, which my brother fell out of once (proof that pride-in-spelling-one’s-own-name goeth before a fall); we had a sandbox, and a swing set. And once, we even had a little pup tent that I was determined to spend the night in even though a thunderstorm was on its way, taking with me as my provisions, a little pack of chiclets–

–until my mother came out and suggested that spending the night over at my Grandma’s might be way more enjoyable than sleeping all night in a tiny little tent all by myself in a thunderstorm.  (Turned out that — just that one time — my mother was right!!)

Anyway, I have wonderful memories of that little house. We lived there until the middle of 1964.

And here is a shot just now of part of my backyard, looking out from the sun room door (something like 8 more inches of snow is due to fall):

Does it kill you to think they are going to demolish all of this later this year? It does me, gang, but the upside is that I am going back to New York and will be living much closer to all my friends. Not to mention, Broadway, midtown Manhattan, those great museums, restaurants, etc., etc. Focusing on that helps take away the heartache for me. And one day, all this will be years behind me, just like Cleveland…

So! On that snappy note, I am going to close this and go figure out what will make me happiest today and then settle in and do precisely that. Have a great Saturday, wherever you are and whichever breezes are blowing in your direction, gang, be they balmy or blastingly cold!! Thanks for visiting. See ya!