Is Ice Another Word For Snow?

It was another one of those lovely mornings graced by a slick layer of ice, school closings and delays, and having to hazard another vehicular ride down the hill, regardless. But I like the school in the morning when nobody is there. It's warm, it's quiet, and it's reminiscent of when I used to work nights. If teachers stayed on too late after the kids left, I would sometimes suggest to them that it was time they went home as well. I would point out to them that everything would still be there in the morning and they would want to be as fresh as possible for the returning tide of children. This often brought to their faces a look of dark and quiet fear; the realization perhaps of the fact that nothing they could do in that evening would prevent tomorrow morning from coming.

Except possibly a snow day. Or an ice day, which is the hallmark of this particular winter. We've had several. One morning when I came in, fully expecting that I would have the empty building to myself, there was already a teacher there. The auto-alert system had failed, and she had missed the follow-up call because she had needed to leave earlier than most since she lived so far away. She sat at her desk,  tears running down her face. She explained that she usually went running every morning, so she could face coming into school. She hadn't been able to run that morning because the road was too slippery.
   "Love your job?" I asked, none too kindly, I suppose.
   "I hate my job!" She said emphatically. "Day in and day out, trying to teach these little fuckers! The kids hate me, the parents hate me..." She choked back a sob. "I'd better not say any more." Then she swallowed and looked over her shoulder at the projection on the white screen behind her desk. "I'm learning all the countries of the Middle East. Somehow I never got around to that before."

One of the things I like about working at the school is this cat that lives in town, with some residence adjacent to the school. He's a hefty cream-colored fellow, and I've known him since he was a kitten. One evening (sigh...when I still worked evenings), I looked up from my work vacuuming a classroom in a room slightly below grade, there to see this half-grown cat watching me. As I pushed the wand of the vacuum back and forth over the carpet, he followed my actions with the full motion of his head, back and forth. When I saw him watching me I thoughtlessly stopped and laughed out loud. He looked startled and hastily ran off. In subsequent years, he continues to patrol the grounds, always walking a route around the school building. When I come in to shovel snow before the kids arrive, I will invariably see his tracks ringing the building, passing every exit, under every window. When he was a kitten, he had a brother, a black and white fellow with a bib. I know this because they used to travel together and I asked their owner, a middle schooler in town, what their names were. She told me and I forgot. Wanting to have a name to call them by, I asked the middle schooler's mother for clarification. She looked at me quizzically. "We don't have a cat," she said. I don't know what ever happened to the brother. Probably the kid's mother doesn't know, either.