Parent life / A childhood memory shared in 2018
The Window Weather Service
The instructions were simple: throw ice out the window at night. The results, one former child will tell you, were perfect.
JJ's teacher had a method. Throw ice cubes outside your window at night, and the next day it would snow. JJ was in elementary school in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the time. The other kids at school believed it too, which must have helped. When your schoolmates agree on the physics, who needs peer review?
It worked every time. That, at least, is how JJ remembers it. You have to appreciate the position this put a child in. You are perhaps seven years old. You have been given a direct line to the weather. Nobody has mentioned terms and conditions. The ice goes out; the snow comes in. You would feel powerful too. JJ did — they recall feeling like they could control the weather, which at that age is not arrogance so much as a reasonable reading of the available evidence.
JJ was eighteen and studying at USC when they shared this in a 2018 folklore interview, by which time a suspicion had developed. Looking back, JJ suspected snow had already been forecast whenever the teacher suggested the ice-cube method. It is a gentle theory — it doesn't spoil the memory so much as relocate the magic from the windowsill to the teacher's timing. JJ calls the whole thing silly now. But a child who believed they could make it snow, and who kept receiving what looked like confirmation, had no particular reason to stop.