Slush

I was walking through our campus and saw a woman who must have been a mother, waiting outside one of the girls' dorms. As she waited for her daughter, she was using her boot to plow around the snow that was rapidly turning to slush.

It's behavior that's so uncharacteristic for an adult (at least in public!) that one could be tempted to call campus security to escort the crazy woman off campus, but even if she was crazy, she seemed harmless enough. Anyway, who hasn't sometimes felt the call of playing with snow? For me, there's always been a certain appeal, on days like today when the temperature is above freezing but most of the snow hasn't yet realized it, to stepping on the snow to turn it into slush, perhaps making patterns through the choice of which fallen precipitation stays snow and which transmutes into a new state of being. There's just something oddly satisfying about this sort of thing.

Before seeing this woman out and about, I might have thought it was a guy thing--we have a tendency to amuse ourselves with fairly simple, made-up-on-the-spot games, either solo or with company, but obviously this child-like amusement knows no gender boundaries. It's probably good for the soul, to break out of our adult stodginess once in a while, to smush snow to slush, and not to rush.

Later in the day, I was walking our dog, Beaker, and I looked back to see our respective trails through the snow. Mine was a straight line between A & B, while hers looped around, back-tracked, and went off on tangents as whim--or her nose--moved her. At the end of the walk, we both arrived in the same place, but who had more fun getting there?