What’s not to love about a snow day? If, of course, a person doesn’t have to drive to work or haul a kid back up a hill on a sled. Yep, being old and retired has its benefits. A body can view (and take pictures of) a snow day out the window while staying inside, where it’s nice and warm.

Notice the tiny snowbirds on the ground behind the flag in the picture below. My husband was smart enough to top off the feeders on Friday before the snow arrived. We’ve had fun watching an assortment of birds dashing by for a nibble here and there.

We were even graced by the presence of a cardinal, our state bird, which seemed to dodge having its picture made by eating on the side of the feeders we couldn’t see from the kitchen windows. I guess this redbird knew we weren’t coming out of the house. My husband finally got a decent shot of it sitting on a bare branch of a snowy crepe myrtle with our neighbor’s house in the background.

The side yard was just as lovely as the backyard. The snow on the bird bath looks like a giant plastic bottle cap or maybe a fancy white tablecloth. This would be good place to scoop off the top layer for snow cream, if I’d ever learned to make it to taste the way my mother’s did. I fondly remember her slushy concoction. My few attempts always tasted like ice with vanilla flavoring.

The stems of rosemary are wearing their winter white quite well, don’t you think?

Part of the fun of a snow day is checking in with others to see how many inches they got. According to one of my daughters, we beat Charlotte this week. She eyeballed her deck there and pronounced only a couple of inches.

My other Charlotte daughter is in Beech Mountain this weekend, where, if it’s January, there’s sure to be snow.

Out my front window, I can see the neighborhood snow-day hangout. There’s a hill, well as much as we have a hill in this neck of the woods, that ends in a cul-de-sac. It’s good for sledding down although there’s no ski lift to bring sledders back up. (See job of parents on snow day in first paragraph.)

Of course before sledding down, if you’re a kid, it’s fun to throw a few snowballs and just roll around in the snow.

Alas, the sun came out for a while, raising the temperature just a little, and the sledders gave their slope a workout. Before long, the once pristine “hill” became a little slushy. Often a snow day in eastern North Carolina is just that, a day. It’s fun while it lasts, though, especially if you can view the winter wonderland from inside the house.