Nancy Stancill

    Nancy Stancill spent 38 years as a newspaper reporter and editor before she began writing fiction full-time. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, she earned an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Tampa in 2015.

   Her works include Saving Texas (2013), Winning Texas (2016), Tall (nonfiction, 2020), and Deadly Secrets ( 2024).

  More on Nancy is here.

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What was that blinding whiteness?

By

Feb. 17, 2014

I was thrilled when it snowed last week – until the second day. That’s when I discovered that I really didn’t know what to do with a snow day anymore.

Growing up in Radford, Va., snow days were frequent and fun. Among my favorite things – sledding on a really steep hill a few blocks from my house, and ice-skating on a big pond two miles away. The coed ice-skating especially was fun when we were flirty teenagers. I was pretty good at it (the ice-skating, not the flirting, alas.) Fast-forward 20 years to Houston, Texas, when a female friend asked me to ice-skate at the Galleria, a fancy mall with a large ice rink in the middle and lots of hoity-toity spectators. Somehow, I’d lost all of my skills – and my balance. I was mortifyingly bad and felt like my pratfalls served as free entertainment for the high-end crowd, even their children. I tried one more time at a place with fewer spectators – to no avail.

The first day it snowed last week I just enjoyed the rare beauty. By the second day, I became a bit anxious. I hate cold weather and didn’t want to go out in it. But I felt like I should do something. I no longer had a child to play in the snow with, and my husband seemed more interested in getting his taxes done. I had plenty of writing to do, but kept getting distracted by the blinding whiteness through the windows. In the end, I just looked at it a lot.

 

 

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