My favorite snow memory: Other than the Christmas ice storm, my favorite snow memory was in college, and it must have been my junior year because I remember being in my North Court room. My now-husband, my best friend Michelle, and I were in my dorm room doing something college-studentesque, like playing Super Mario 3 on my original Nintendo, or watching The Princess Bride, or studying (no, that’s probably what my roomie was doing….I loved that girl!).

We decided that it was much too cold and snowy to trudge all the way to the dining hall, so we commenced calling take-out places until we found a Chinese restaurant that was willing to deliver. Unfortunately, the delivery guy claimed he knew where my dorm was and then called us 42 times to try to figure out where we were. Michelle and I finally sent Adam outside into the wild to find the delivery man and fetch us our dinner. He eventually did discover the wondering delivery man, and we spread a blanket on the floor in the dorm room and had a Chinese-food picnic. It was awesome.

A close second: One year we were lucky enough to have our cousins Matthew, Andrew, and Brianne visiting when we were struck with snowfall. (Snow doesn’t happen often in Richmond, VA…it was always exciting.) Our house was in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a giant hill. You could take a sled to the top of the street and sled all the way down almost to our house (probably 1/4 a mile). We have this lucky moment on video: my cousin Matthew, probably 6 or 7, sledding right into the ditch in front of the neighbor’s house. It seems he confused himself and said something like, “Where am I?” For some reason we thought this was hysterical. And so we kept asking him to do it again. Our neighborhood had the best sledding hills. I guess that’s why we didn’t get bored when we were off school for 3 weeks at a time because there was still a tiny little patch of snow somewhere in Chesterfield County.

My least favorite snow memory: One of those times we were out of school for 3 weeks, I was getting bored. I was home with my sister; I was in 8th grade, which would have made her in 5th grade. She called Mom at work to see if she could go outside without me, and got permission. So I was lazing around inside–still my favorite activity–when she came rushing in with our next-door neighbor, and was pouring blood from her arm. She and the neighbor had tried to pet the neighbor’s dog, Waldo, who was a giant black lab. Waldo attacked Ashley, somehow managing to rip her arm open but not her coat?? [Strangely, I experienced this phenomenon when I had my car accident. In almost the same spot as Ashley's scar, I now have a scar where glass dug a hole in my arm but did not rip my sweater at all.]

All I remember was panicking. According to my mom, I was a beacon of calm. I elevated her arm, wrapped it and put pressure on it, called Mom at work and got her out of a meeting, and called 911. I vividly remember that instead of waiting for the ambulance, though, we rode to the hospital in the back of our neighbor’s painting van. I always wondered if we would get in trouble for leaving without the ambulance, or maybe someone called and canceled it.

Anyway, Ashley was fine, but she does have a big old scar from the attack and had to go through the “does it have rabies” scare and everything. And I have a very severe fear of big, black dogs.