Boston needs more snow. Please let it snow. This isn’t a plea, it’s an imperative, a must, a necessity, a demand.
Sure we’re all burnt out by cabin fever, parking anxiety and T shutdown woes, but we’ve come too far to have nothing to show for it. We’re at 100+, just a scant few inches from the all-time Boston snowfall record. To have arrived at such a precipice of double-cutting distinction, we’ve endured arctic cold 30 degrees below the seasonal average, fought the space saver fight in close quarters, had roofs cave in and lived through it. To not make the record now would be to run the Boston Marathon and drop out at Mass Ave and Boylston. It would be akin to the Patriots’ perfect season going up in smoke to David Tyree and the Giants in Super Bowl XLII.
There’s no two-finger, helmet pinning catch to thwart the residents of the Hub, all we need is for mother nature to finish the job, to cap off the season of our displeasure with a final dusting or two, an angry, yet liberating icing atop our high-towered, multi-layered cake of misery. The winter of 2015 has truly tried Boston’s patience, mettle and sense of neighborly civility. We’ve been so laden that the snow farms that amassed in the Seaport and Danehy Park out in Cambridge grew so tall and Brobdingnag that the ceaselessly laboring bulldozers and backhoes seeking to shift the bane of our obstructed roadways to Babel aspiring heights looked like matchbox miniatures left strewn about a playground sandpit. It didn’t help either that the T, the backbone of Boston’s commerce, came to an utter standstill, further stranding and isolating the snowbound and the weary, and to add insult to injury, the T’s helmswoman threw in the towel when it was time to roll up the sleeves and get the city moving again.
Even now, in mid-March as the temperatures begin to flutter above freezing, the notion of side streets crowded by snow entombed cars, looking eerily like a post-apocalyptic movie set, and the high impenetrable walls that channeled our broad bricked walkways into single-tracked gullies of icy navigation hell, seem an eternity away. But not too far. That knot between your shoulders, that aching pain in your lower back, brought on by repetitive snow shovel stress, and the matted white sheen of crusted salt coating your car, let alone the banged-it-in abrasions across your bumper, serve as unfriendly reminders even as the welcomed green buds of crocuses and lilies push upward through the thawing ground. What’s that? You booked your family vacation during that early first week on the Cape, right after school lets out and before the Fourth of July fill up, so you could get the pre-season discount? Snow days just threw that plan under the bus and now you’re scrambling, trying not to lose your shirt while hoping to salvage some semblance of sea, sun and family. Back then, when you booked it, probably just after Labor Day, it seemed like such a far-off cozy dream, Eden on layaway, and now it’s become a squawking Albatross, a scheduling conundrum, a source of rue, likely relegated to a panicked long weekend propelled by point A to point B stress. Bless you, Elsa.
Spring will come. The big melt-off will bear vernal pools and slushy, sloppy splash ways, The T will resurrect and run, so will the debate on global warming and the climate changed shifting of the jet stream. Also lingering in the soggy aftermath, like the ugly gray archeological horrors pinned deep down under the icy brown bottom strata, are the reputations of those who refused to shovel their sidewalks or continued to mark “their” public parking space with a rusted out lounge chair or orange hazard cone backed by a cinderblock enforcer, long after the 48-hour grace period granted with merciful contemplation by the mayor, expired. The thaw does not forgive, but the warmth of long rays brings contentment and tranquility to all. Birds, bees and blossoms are just around the corner. You can already see and smell the traces of it as we sail through the Ides of March, but with such forward, “good-bye and good riddance” thinking, our harrowing season of woe, that thing that will only live on in our joints and marred cars, might become forgotten, a flickering memory consigned to become just a footnote, an asterisk, a point of comparison, but never the main attraction. Do we want the one indelible image from the winter of 2015 to be some knuckle-headed naysayer holding a snowball up in Congress? No. Absolutely No! For all that we have contended with, the loss of power, the lack of transportation, the bitter biting cold and no place to toss the ever-coming snow, we need to ring the bell, we need to reach the top. One hundred and ten sounds like a nice number to notch. So before it all goes, please let it snow.