cimorene

I used to be fairly fascinated with the snowed-in cliché fic, from childhood, you understand, even before I encountered the popular and thriving version of it that exists in the paperback romance novel genre. Now, up to the age of seven I lived in Kansas, Canada and upstate New York, and frequent visits to Kansas and Washington DC throughout the rest of my childhood made sure that I wasn't unfamiliar with snow, but the last time I saw huge drifts of it was at dad's old bff's old farm in upstate New York, where we went out sledding on hills covered in tremendous snow drifts, and I sank in sometimes to the thighs of my little snowsuit when I walked. But that was a distant and exotic memory; as a city girl, most of my acquaintance with snow - even the healthy amount that lets you build snowmen - was at most four or five inches, I guess. Rarely that. So blizzard fic held a thrilling threat, a frisson of the unknown and fantastic.

Well, it's been quite a while since I've read any serious paperback romance type blizzard fic - kind of odd since I read so much slash, but what can you do? I guess media fandom is moving away from that type of plot nowadays - so when I started rereading one today, the blizzard scene became distinctly surreal. There are still echoes in my head of the impressions I used to hold about it, formed, no doubt, from the Little House on the Prairie books at an impressionable age. But now I'm like: "Wading through calf-high snow? But what's the big deal? That's fun!" and I can't help thinking this heroine is a moron if she lives anywhere in New York at all and doesn't have appropriate outer garments for that.