Snow Day

   Today is our fourth snow day in 2011. That's one snow day per week in the new year. Today's snow fell sometime in the early morning hours and stopped by the time I had woken up at 5am. There's at least 12 inches on the ground on top of about 3 inches that fell yesterday morning between 9 and noon. It is large-flaked, heavy and quite beautiful. It's not bad shoveling snow unless you give in to the instinct to pile too much onto your shovel and then it's quite heavy. How can so many light flakes create such a heavy mass?
   Now with four days' of experience, I'm beginning to want more ways to describe the day. For this, I've turned to the Eskimos. It turns out that they may not actually have more words than the rest of us to describe snow, but what they do have is a highly nuanced language for snow. Looking at a list of "lexemes" I am most drawn to nutaryuk, meaning "fresh snow," on this beautiful Snow Day #4. 
   Perhaps from the winter of 2011 will arise new holidays and today will be Nutaryuk Day, the day of fresh snow. Our first snow day would be Pirta Day, blizzard day and Day #2 would be Anui Day, snow on the ground day. Snow Day #3 would be hard to describe. That was the day the snow barely made it to the ground. Maybe it's a term like Snow in the Air Day. We called it a No Snow Snow Day.
   I wonder what we'll call next week's snow day?


Note: At mid-day I shoveled our walk and decided this snow is Wedding Cake Snow, the kind you have to shovel by the slice because it's too heavy to lift in shovelfuls.