Who says snow days are just for kids?

Thank you, Ed Mangano, and Bill de Blasio, and Andrew Cuomo, for the gift of a guilt-free day off that you, and the heavens, bestowed on us on Jan. 27, the day of the blizzard that almost wasn’t.

Like the ferocious furnace-fighting father in Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story,” I am a snow fighter. Ridding the sidewalk, the driveway, and the surrounding environs of any accumulation has been an obsession since I moved from Queens to Nassau County 21 years ago. A most reluctant emigre, I was dragged, emotionally kicking and screaming, across the city line and into suburban homeownership.

We purchased what I referred to as a “Jewish handyman special”: It required no repairs. We were the new kids on the block. The older, more established neighbors, who were the first, or perhaps the second, owners in our mid-1950s housing development, gave us stink-eyed attention. The marketability of their retirement-funding homes, with an inflated perceived value based on the 1980s real estate boom, was, in their eyes, deflated by the price we’d paid, one of the few topics on which they deigned to converse with us.

Over the years, as the curmudgeons departed for warmer climes, a newer, more hospitable group gradually moved in. We gracefully matured into the street elders. Yet there was always so little time for interaction. I would greet the dog walkers for a minute or two of conversation as I headed out, pre-dawn, to swim at Eisenhower Park, to run the Long Beach boardwalk or to practice yoga. Or we’d have a brief early-evening chat as we got out of our respective vehicles after a long day’s toil at our respective professions, before heading in for dinner and our respective family responsibilities.