This week, snow lovers across the South are again standing on tip toes at our winterfrosted windows, waiting for the alleged snowfall that the weatherman has been flapping his gums about all week.

I’m a little skeptical. I’ll believe it when the fat flakes melt on my nose, and not a moment before.

It seems it’s always been this way – several times a winter we’ll have great hopes for snow only to have them dashed by the ugly geographical fact that we’re just too far south.

Usually. While I fully expect to be bitterly disappointed by Mother Nature once again, I do recognize the possibility we could get an oldfashioned, traffic-paralyzing, noschool, everybody-panic snowfall this week. I’m just not holding my breath anymore.

I’ve learned that just because a weather-guesser employs the sword as a possibility in some part of the state, it more than likely means nothing to us but the usual cold rain and disappointment.

If it does snow, it’s usually the kind you have to look hard to see, falling among the raindrops, or the kind that melts on contact with anything. I remember many nights as a child straining at the window for any sight of snow by streetlight. The smell of snow in the air had me snoofing like a bloodhound. Far more often than not, I’d be let down. Such was life in the South.

Hope stays alive, though, because of the memories of the times it did snow, and snow a lot. When I was nine, I remember we had to rush home New Years Eve to beat an eight-inch snow fall that covered my young world the next morning in a blanket I’d never seen before. I remember three or four good snowfalls growing up, and ten times that number of disappointments and dustings.

In my travels, of course, I’ve been seriously snowed on. My young family survived twelve feet of snow in upstate New York the year we spent at Syracuse University. The boys were two and four, a fun age when snow comes measured in feet. We got to play in serious snow, too, high up in the Alps in Italy and Germany, and got to camp and hike in snow in the Rockies. You’d think that would be enough.

But it’s not. I’m still a Southern kid when it comes to snow, no matter what.

I love the smell of snow, the gentle sound of it falling, the nighttime glow that fills the air. I enjoy the way a fresh snowfall covers up all the mundane brownness of the winter with a fresh coat of pure beauty. If I have the time, I enjoy watching it fall on my property and the surrounding woods. If I’m out and about, I even enjoy driving in the snow, even as all my neighbors scramble through the slush to grab up the last loaf of bread and roll of toilet paper in town.

It’s also a guaranteed front-page news story, and I have to cover it, by which I mean go play in the snow, shooting photos of wrecks and fallen trees and kids playing. This passes for work. What’s not to like?

So here I stand, looking up at the winter sky with a boy’s eternal hopes, tempered by a man’s years of rainy disappointment. What will it be?

Yeah, I’m with you. I hope the kid’s right. Let it snow.