Snow

Poverty looks like peeling paint on wooden windows, broken glass patched with tape, flat tires, and barren yards where even the weeds fear to grow.
Poverty smells like stale beer, cooked cabbage, urine and Roach-Ex.
Poverty feels like despair. Day in and day out, it seeps into you and weighs you down.

Snow is everything that poverty is not. Snow is white and sparkling, it covers everything and weighs practically nothing. I have always loved snow. I love watching it drift in the air. I love watching it coat the world. I love clearing the sidewalk, and I love playing in it.

My sister and I would build snowmen in the back yard, because they would be safe there. If we built them in the front yard, the snowmen would get knocked over and the remains would be thrown at passing cars. We went sledding on cardboard boxes until my sister found a real sled at a yard sale. And we threw millions of snowballs.
The boys in the neighborhood would shove rocks in their snowballs before throwing them. We got revenge by dipping ours in the gutter and making slush balls. All of us threw things at the busses. We would hide behind cars, with a stash of snowballs and bombard the bus as it came down the street. It gave us a feeling of power to smack a snowball against the bus window, where some working stiff was resting his head.
I never attacked the homeless people, but a lot of the other kids did. Woe to the hapless bums on a snow day. The neighborhood kids would run at them with their arms full of rock encrusted snowballs, and bombard the poor fellows. The homeless would inevitable hunch their shoulders and wander away. They never fought back. Perhaps that's why I didn't take part in the game. I couldn't see the fun in attacking someone less powerful than myself.

One year we had an honest-to-God blizzard. The total snowfall that week was more than 2 feet. The kid next door dug snow tunnels all over his yard. He was out there most of the day, moving snow.
I was so excited. Finally enough snow to build an igloo! I grabbed the snow shovel and made a giant mound of snow in the back yard. Then I couldn't figure out how to turn a mountain of snow into an igloo. I thought I should make the snow a little denser first, so I smacked the mound with the shovel to firm it up. Then I had a small, dense mound. Hmm. I added more snow and tamped it down again. My mound was not noticeably larger.
Eventually, after several hours of work, the yard was half empty and I was the proud owner of a 5 foot high flat-bottomed snowball. I went inside to have some hot cocoa and think about this. Sometime during the snow moving, I had come up with a brilliant idea. When snow is a day or so old, it gets a layer of ice on the top. If I could create a layer of ice, I would have a see through igloo. How cool is that?
I took a cup of water outside and poured it on my snow mound, but everything the water touched turned to slush. This clearly wasn't working out as I'd hoped. Never one to give up easily, I filled the spray bottle mom used for misting the plants, and tried spritzing the snow mound.
Better.
It still turned to slush, but not as much. I spritzed the entire mound and went inside for the night. I was cold, my mittens were wet, and I was thinking the whole thing might have been a waste of time. The next morning, my snow mound had been trampled by the kids who lived downstairs.

I have since learned the mechanics of building an igloo. I went about it in entirely the wrong way. :)