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It is Valentine’s Day when I’m writing this. When you read this column, a month hence, you will be thinking about St. Patrick’s Day or Spring Break or maybe ahead to Passover or Easter. This particular snow will have thawed although other snow may have come and thawed and come and thawed again.

I love snow more than life itself. Well, I also love the monsoon storms more than life itself. I love it in the way the my Diné friends keep stickers on their water bottles that read, “Water Is Life.� To live in a place that can be saturated is a gift. That seasons continue to spin despite earthquakes and school shootings and train derailments that explode toxic clouds into the atmosphere helps keep me sane. I don’t know how I would live without seasons. Without the disruption that snow brings. Without the measuring by inches of precipitation. Without cursing my shovel. Without complaining with the neighbors about the berm erected at the end of my driveway by the snowplow. These communal, collective experiences are part of what make Flagstaff, Flagstaff. We are seasonally afflicted: Snow. Wind. Fires. Floods. But we are also seasonally connected: shoveling together, hatch battening together. Evacuating together. Sandbagging together. I love how on Facebook and Twitter and even Nextdoor App, we plant measuring sticks in our yards and upload pictures of them and of kids on sleds. Does weather make a city? Possibly. Although, I suppose LA and Phoenix still count themselves as cities even if they are low on seasons and storms and things to do about the weather.

I, selfishly, love the snow because I would rather cross-country ski than run. My main exercise is “running,� which I do by taking my dogs in the woods behind the house and perform a kind of gallop behind them. This year, the third greatest snowfall in January since they’ve been keeping record, has allowed me to ski in the woods every day since the first big snowfall—except for the visiting writer trip I took to Maryland—including today. When the first storm promised two feet of snow, I refreshed the Weather Underground app every 16 minutes, almost as often as my son refreshed the FUSD snow day alert page. Between the two of us, we sucked up all the internet and flitted around the house like cat-stalked mice. What if it didn’t snow? How would I ski? Would I have to run? My son asking, would I have to go to school? Do I have to do my homework?

It did snow. My son played Fortnite, promising he’d shovel soon. I trekked into the forest. The first day, the snow was so deep I could only cut tracks halfway to my usual loop. The next day, I cut the second half. The kids shoveled the first round. I shoveled the next. My husband, enlisted in his regular job, his school board job, and a painting around the new doors job, shoveled in the evening. I measured the snow, albeit with the measuring stick planted the wrong way, 22 inches. Perhaps this is an indication of how rare this is. A title of a book from the 70s, “I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up from Here.� That’s the surprise of this snow pack. The last ten years have been all frosting but no cake. The snow usually lasts a day and only the most desperate people (like me) try to ski on such thin hope.

But this year reminds me of how Flagstaff is a do or die kind of town. Finding your way through snow is empowering. Thinking you could cross-country ski to the store if you had to. Figuring out where to put the next six inches of snow makes you appreciate both they who do calculus and structural engineers. Being grateful to your neighbor for snow-blowing our driveway, our neighbor’s, our other neighbors. Imagining living in a car-free world where driving is necessary only for the tow-trucks who extract they who shouldn’t be driving out of ditches.

To cross-country ski nearly 30 days in a row is an unexpected gift. I shouldn’t be so greedy, hoping for more snow, refreshing weather underground again and again, hoping that tomorrow provides deep and slippery snow.

It has snowed a lot in Utah this winter, too. Growing up in Salt Lake City, my dad wouldn’t take us skiing until the base hit 80 inches. We were privileged in more than one way. Privileged to have a dad to take us skiing. Privileged to believe that the base would hit 80 inches by the end of December, without fail. The Sierra Nevadas, thanks to the ‘atmospheric river� have catapulted parts of California out of ‘extreme drought� status to merely ‘severe drought.� This year, both in Flagstaff and Salt Lake, feels like old times—the shoveling, the berm-complaining, the cross-country skiing.

365betÌåÓýÔÚÏßÊÀ½ç±­ I read Craig Childsâ€� essay in High Country News about Lake Powell’s imminent demise. I love how conflicted he is about the ‘lake,â€� which he called it, even though scolded by Katie Lee he was told not to call it. It’s a reservoir. A fake lake. An abomination, to a lot of us. And yet, still a fantastic display of so much water in a place where water is scarce. Lake Powell is so low that the turbines used to create hydroelectric power have nearly surfaced. It would take at least 6-7 remarkably good snowpack years to bring the lake even to its half-full point. The Colorado River, which supplies Lake Powell, is already almost over. The number of people reliant on its water, many of whom live in places without any snowfall and little rain, exceeds the number of gallons per person provided. The snow this year! It is magnificent. We can shovel it and ski on it and sled on it, and, with my son’s good luck, miss school on it. But one year is not enough to catapult us back to the days when my dad 80-inch base or bust. This year has been a dream year of snow. But it’s time to wake up. What will we talk about in Flagstaff in the winter of the future? How will Flagstaff still be Flag?