Many years ago, my sister, brother, and I walked to Central Park from our apartments on East 83rd Street in Manhattan. It had snowed tremendously, and our companies had given us a snow day. This was before anyone had computers in their homes so very few people were expected to work from home.

We trudged westward through the snow, up East 83rd to Fifth Avenue, and across Fifth to the park. We slogged through the knee-deep snow, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s glass enclosure that housed the Egyptian room.

My sister told my brother and me that we should write about what it was like to walk around New York City in the snow. She said that that was what real writers would do. That was a dig at us because we fancied ourselves writers. Our brother was actually earning a living by writing for a trade magazine at the time. I just told people that I could write and some of them, my sister included, believed me.

Anyway, we returned home with cold hands and feet … and warm insides due to our prolonged stop at a bar. Neither my brother nor I wrote about our day. Even if we had, who would we have submitted our stories to? It’s not like there were blogs back then.

The next day, my sister, brother, and I must have met up again because I remember her waving The New York Daily News, or maybe Newsday, at us. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to an article. “Jimmy Breslin wrote about walking around New York in the snow yesterday. I told you both that you should have written about the snow.” We told her that we weren’t well-known writers with established columns in a New York newspaper. She said it didn’t matter. That’s what writers did: they wrote. Looking back, I see that she was right. We should have written for ourselves, if for no one else.

The other day, it snowed a foot in Norwalk, Connecticut, where I live. The winds blew maniacally and the temperature felt like it was in the low single digits. It was too cold to leave the house, so my only interaction with the snow was through my home-office window. From what I could see, the wind was so strong that the snow fell sideways, and nobody came out of their houses due to the extreme cold.

My company’s office was officially closed for the snow day, but we were all told to work from home. I complained to my husband that snow days weren’t fun anymore, now that we had to work through them.

But, truthfully, I was secretly relieved to have an excuse for not writing about the snow.