The ground has been dusted with white, and that’s quite an event around here. But I grew up in Iowa. It’s about 800 miles north-northeast of Abilene and a good 30 degrees colder in the winter. Up there, we had substantial snow. That magical feeling of transformation you felt a few days ago upon seeing your snow-covered yard is similar to what my family and I felt viewing the first hint of grass after the winter (and most of spring.)

My childhood saw a lot of really great snow. Snow was the most fun naturally-occurring phenomena of those days, perhaps even tying with trees. The sunny times were great for picnics, but here’s why snow was and is so great.

First, there was the eeriness of it. Walking outside in near-silence was chilling. Not only was the sound flattened, the visuals were simplified, too. No colors, no hard edges, often one couldn’t find where the land met the sky, everything was white as clean paper. And it’s that clean paper look that was so inviting.

With the snow, one could create anything. Caves large enough to sleep in and mazes of canyons. The standard tri-sphere snowman was common, but with patience one could fashion child-sized dinosaurs and towering replicas of Gondorian citadels.

As appealing as a seven-foot tall Minas-Tirith was to a child’s creative tendencies, the destructive potential of snow was ever present. Consider this, when playing outside in the snow all of the participants were attired in very protective padded material. The snow itself was a kind of padding, to further reduce injury and consequences. Rough behavior, therefore, was inevitable, all the more so when one noticed that the whole of the ground was covered in a limitless supply of ammunition. Simply reaching down and making a fist filled one’s hand with a formidable projectile. Snow could be thrown, siblings could be thrown, battles could be waged with almost no ill-effects. One’s backyard became a place of eternal and glorious battle, a like the fields surrounding Valhalla.

But greater and more fantastic than all these properties of the snow was its use on the sledding hill. To a child, sledding was surely the noblest of winter adventures. It combined the thrilling elements of the snow battle with the fine precision of snow sculpting. In sculpting one risked frozen fingers, in a snowball fight one risked an ice-covered face, but in sledding one risked full paralysis if not instant death.

I was very young when my parents gave me a flexible flyer for Christmas. I read the name on the box started jumping around thinking it was a jetpack-like flying machine. They explained it was only a sled, which is a board with some rails underneath. I was disappointed until I actually threw myself down a hill on it. As the crippling trees whipped past, I realized that my parents had lied, and it was really a jetpack-like flying machine after all, one that was simply powered by snow.

So take your warm beaches and sunny picnics or relaxing rainy days, my preferred precipitate is beautiful white snow.