The snow is outside.  Waiting.  I can see it, still, resting, on the flip side of my window.  “Snow, snow, go away,” I chant, but I know it’s laughing at me, amused by my efforts and entirely unaffected by the rhymes that held so much more power when I was young enough to listen intently, one night each year, for a careless sleigh bell up high.  Snow was magic then.

Now it’s just malevolent.  Hand-in-hand with its pal the bitter cold, they’re pressing their ice cube noses up against my second floor window and daring me to come outside; a tag team of winter vampires hoping to dine on chilled… wine.  It promises beauty, this blanket of white, and each polka-dotted burst from the heavens carries the seductive memory of the anticipation of school being canceled.  They’re my memories, true, but they no longer apply: these days when the blizzard hits I no longer can count on the comfort of a couch, cartoons, and a bowl full of puffed sugar Ohs; instead, I work for The Man, and he tells me I have to trudge on in to work, anyway, no matter the revival of He-Man scheduled for that morning’s line-up.

The Man has no soul.  But he pays well, so there’s that.

The snow is relentless.  It follows me to work and tries to swallow me, to my knees, when I misstep on the journey from my car to the front door. “Haw-haw,” it says, as I wiggle free.  “I’m just joshin’ ya.  But I sure got ya, didn’t I?”  One of these days I know it won’t let go, and that we’ll finally get to the punchline I’m pretty sure I won’t find all that hilarious.

So, it’s there, still, outside, peeking into my office window from the adjacent roof–a Jack Frost who’s really a Peeping Tom.  It’s tempting to want to grab an extension cord and my wife’s hair dryer and go teach the bastard a lesson.  When tomorrow morning finally stumbles in and the squawk box tells tales of a man-shaped icicle  found dangling from his roof with a sputtering Conair in his hand, know that I went down fighting.  And that I ruined my wife’s hair dryer.

But that I went down fighting is a much more manly memory.  So, maybe you can tell people I had a flamethrower?

Yeah.  Snownan the Barbarian, that’s me.