The Last Day of Childhood by Mark Anthony Neal

"#SnowDay" courtesy of Misha Gabrielle NealDuke Professor and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal recalls the snow days of his childhood and the rare chance to experience another with his growing daughters.

The Last Day of Childhoodby Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I can’t say that snow days were ever my thing.  The store-bought, commercially approved  greeting card images of young White children rollicking in the snow, sledding safely into their dad’s arms, mom waiting to nestle them with a steaming cup of hot cocoa were always incongruent with my reality: pissed stained, muddied slush. 
The 'hood is still 'hood, even when it was blanketed with 11-inches of snow.  As a kid, every time I heard Johnny Mathis sing “Winter Wonderland” I thought he was out of his fuckin’ mind.
Raising my daughters in the South, snow days have different flow; schools days are cancelled more often than not, for what amounts to sugar dustings, on the top of sheets of ice. I get the safety issues associated with the cancellations, though I often find myself telling tall tales (that are not all that tall), about having to still get to work on days when 17-inches of snow fell the night before.   
Both daughters were too young to remember the Christmas day in Schenectady that gifted us 3-feet of snow; we departed for Austin, Texas  the following summer having enough of those northeast winters.
And yet on a late February day in North Carolina, the Gods of Winter felt need to give us a legitimate snow day; 8 inches of snow in the Triangle, which given the challenges of the region, pretty much amounts to that 3-foot White Christmas.
The youngest, just on the verge of teenagedom, morphed straight from pajamas to hooded coat and pink garden boots; she and the dogs were rollicking--yes, rollicking--in the snow before I could blink an eye.  The oldest, often far too consumed with school and swim practice, left the comfort of her bed--and the always elusive promise of sleeping-in--to cooly sit on the stairs of the porch (with one of the dogs) to take shots from her camera.
While I have often been dismissive of the middle-class comforts that my partner and I have worked damned hard to ensure for our daughters, and even more so, the idealized middle-class lives that get depicted on television and film, I found myself, at this moment, living that very greeting card that I so despised in my youth.
As a snow-ball whizzed past my face, amidst demands that after breakfast we make a snow person (as if I knew how to or even cared how to), I was reminded (as I am often these days) of how fleeting these moments are.  Sooner than I like to admit, both daughters will be out of the house, living their own lives, charting the paths that we’ve tried to prepare them for.  Watching them from the porch was as much about seeing them begin to say goodbye to their childhoods, as it was the last day of childhood for me.