The smell of snow

I remember when I first noticed that I could smell when snow was coming. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade and it was a school day in late December, just a day or so before the last day of school before Christmas vacation. My classmates and I were giddy with anticipation. We weren't allowed to run at recess because our schoolyard was nothing but a tiny cement quad surrounded by the school building, the enormous stone church, the parish hall, and the convent with its cemetery for a backyard. It sounds like 19th century Dublin but it was a parish Catholic school in 1970s Philadelphia. We weren't allowed to run because there was no room to run freely without crashing into other kids, and the cement wasn't kind to the bodies that landed on it. Arms got broken. Foreheads split open and bled like geysers. The nuns, who weren't always kind or reasonable, were entirely justified in enforcing the no running rule. But with vacation approaching, they threw up their hands. They knew and we knew and they knew that we knew that there was no stopping kids from running with Christmas on the immediate horizon.  

We didn't run during recess, we 6th and 7th and 8th grade girls. We didn't really even play anymore, although sometimes a girl would bring a Chinese jump rope to school and we'd jump rope, for old time's sake. But mostly, we stood around in little circles and talked. 

You couldn't just say anything. The bossy girls didn't let us talk about schoolwork or our families (except to complain about unfairly strict parents) or books or current events. You could complain about nuns and teachers, you could say mean things about other girls, you could talk about pop music (and only pop music) and movies and TV shows and clothes and hair and who was allowed to have pierced ears (not me) and who wasn’t. And of course, you could talk about boys. You definitely couldn't talk about the weather and so when I blurted out "It smells like snow," I braced myself for the inevitable scoffs. We were working class Irish Catholic Philadelphia school kids in the 1970s. We scoffed at everything, on principle. But no one scoffed. "It does," everyone squealed. "We're gonna get a white Christmas!" I don't remember if it actually snowed or not. I don't remember if we had a white Christmas. But I remember the relief of abandoning the cool soon-to-be-teenage girl facade for that minute or so, and just being little girls again, excited about Christmas. 

*****

That was a very long and roundabout way of telling you that it's Saturday morning, chilly and January gray, and I'm on my way to a high school swim meet. Rockville vs. Magruder. This is one of the last regular season meets of our last high school swim season. It's 8:45 AM and it smells like snow.