Schnee Von Gestern

"Das ist Schnee von gestern" is a way of saying "that's yesterdays news" or "that's old news." The idiom gives me the image, though, of someone throwing snow like confetti over another person, and that second person, with the worn expression of the long-suffering and snow-covered, says, "That's yesterday's snow, mate, come on."

It's December, which means we're all playing the snowfall waiting game, checking the news and the phone for that first day of snow.

I went out a few mornings ago to take a walk around Jack's Michigan neighborhood. Jack tells me that the name for this weather is S'winter, "Summer-Winter," and I understand why. Standing out there in that Michigan parking lot, I felt like a time-traveler to October. Sunny, check, not snowy in the least, check, not too warm, not too cool, that crisp in-between place that weighs lightly on the skin.

Jack visited me last winter and referred to the journey as "the one time I've left Michigan for somewhere colder." I guess we'll see what these dark months have in store for us. See if they measure up to last year. There's something about winter that invites reminiscing. It's probably the fact that we're all stuck indoors, waiting for the ice giants of old to go on their way.

I was born in January. My mother tells me that it was snowing on my birthday, and that snow has followed me ever since. I was in Germany during what turned out, so my professor told us, to be the darkest, coldest winter in twenty years. I took up college at Wellesley during the years that we had the most snow days Swelles has declared in quite some time. Jack would really like us to move to his native Canada in a few years time; I first heard that and thought that, were I a character in a novel, I would be annoyed with the author for being too on-the-nose about the whole snow-and-cold thing.

Maybe it's fate. Maybe I just make poor life decisions when it comes to staying warm. Maybe we should all stop leaving bread and beer out for the ice giants.

Life is full of maybes.

#winter #idiomsarefun