Snowy Thoughts

Snowy Thoughts

No, this isn’t a discussion on my waning mental capacity; although my wife would probably argue that it is apropos.

I have lived in South Carolina continuously since 1986, off and on since 1969, and in that time I don’t ever recall school here being cancelled for an entire week because of snow as it was last week.  It has now been eight days since the onset of the great storm of ’11 as we will call it when our teeth are gone.  With the rain last night the roads are finally totally clear, and only a vestige of the 10 inches of white stuff remains in shadowy spots here and there.  I’ve had a lot of indoor time in this last week, which got me to thinking; always a dangerous circumstance.

Who ever started this bread and milk thing?  It has to be only a southern custom because all of my Yankee friends, (excuse my political incorrectness, those not from around here) get a real charge out of this mad rush to the grocery at the first hint of bad weather.  I have to admit that it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Even with this large storm we were home bound less than 72 hours.  Yet my mother did it, my grandmother did it and it is so imbued even I, with enough food in the freezer to get through the apocalypse, have a Pavlovian response to the prediction of winter weather – “Bread and milk, must get bread and milk”.

My son, who works for a large corporation here struggled in to work on Monday and opened an email that said, “due to inclement weather we ask all employees to use good judgment in deciding whether or not to come in today.  Your safety is our main concern.”  Unfortunately, that bit of wisdom was sent on the company’s internal system that could only be accessed from the office.  Go figure.

I had the great, good fortune to grow up in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where two, maybe three good snows a year were pretty common.  When I was a young person there, snow meant freedom.  I reveled in those days, as did we all, where school was cancelled.  I had visions of my teachers sitting home chagrined that they could not torture me with pop tests or boring lectures.  It was only after I got to know teachers as an adult that I made the startling discovery that they got just as excited as the kids about a break in the routine.  Nowadays those missed days are made up on teacher planning days, which normally come on Friday. We made up our days, all of them, on Saturdays and that, to coin a phrase, sucked.

Some of my warmest memories of those snowy events in North Carolina center on the hill that ran in front of our house.  For the rest of the year it was just an elevated paved road that connected our neighborhood to the highway at the bottom; but on snow days it became one of the two or three major spots in town where people gathered to sled.  I had a Flexible Flyer, which is a type of sled and not a gymnastic flight attendant.  It consisted of a flat wooden deck with two connected handles at the front used to guide; push up on the right handle and pull down on the left to go left and vice versa.  This arrangement was mounted above two metal rails that ran the length of either side of the deck.  At the first sure sign that a storm was imminent and not some yellow weather journalism that would lead to dashed hopes, I would wax and wax those metal runners in order to improve my speed going down the hill.

Donned in at least a ton of coats, sweaters, toboggans, rubber boots that had snaps for closures, and anything else my Mother could possibly get on my body, I would waddle, literally, up the snow and ice covered hill to its summit pulling my sled behind me with a rope my Father had attached to the front for convenience.  Once at the top, with sled in hand I would get a running start, holding the Flyer against my chest; this was the tricky part for you weren’t alone and you would be ridiculed by your peers if you slipped and fell while running at full tilt, throw myself prone on top of the sled and blast down the hill at breakneck speed.  Later, as I got older and bigger, I mounted sitting up and guiding with my feet.  You got your start here by someone giving you a push.  This method also allowed for “doubling” whereby someone, hopefully the object of your current affection, would mount behind and wrap their arms around you to hold on.  At age 12 this was thrilling; especially if the hill was more packed ice than snow and you ran the risk of going all the way to the end of the road and blindly rocketing out onto U.S 311.  However, don’t ever recall any fatalities in all those years.

The top of the hill was a place for a lot of socializing.  Invariably, someone would build a roaring bonfire.  Hot dogs and marshmallows and chili and coat hangers for roasting the dogs and mallows would magically appear.  You have never really had a cold Coke until you’ve drunk one that has been chilled all day in a snow bank.  Upon reflection I suspect that the adults secreted more potent brews around and about, but I have no definitive proof of such.  As the night grew long and the older crowd got louder, I would go for one more run, this time guiding myself off the hill in to my front yard. I would stumble home, tired, happy, cold, and often smelling of gasoline and burned rubber; for if the bonfire ran out of wood someone always seemed to have an old tire to throw on the flames, igniting it with petrol.  Today my hand shakes just at the memory.

Alas, my poor, deprived children, raised here in South Carolina, never owned a Flexible Flyer, never went sledding, never smelled of burnt rubber.  It hardly ever snowed here and even if it did the hills are few and far between.  When my youngest was about five, we were having a summer hailstorm.  As the pebble sized stones accumulated on the lawn he came to me and asked, “Dad, is that snow?”

Ah, the pity of it all.

As time goes by.