Snow!
As I write this, there are four inches of snow on the ground outside. The world is a transformed fairyland, each tree and lane changed by a magic mantle of sparkling white, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
I’ll try not to wax all poetic and corny, but having lived my life so far in the South, the sight of snow never fails to get to me. My wife woke me up last night, and said to look outside. There’s a strange effect, that even in darkness, what light there is bounces from the snowy ground to the whitened sky and back, so there’s this eerie ambient brightness. It’s hard to describe.
Like every other fool in Atlanta, my wife and I went on a massive grocery run before the storm hit. To be fair, we would have gone shopping anyway. About once a month, we lay in supplies, and it was that time. We are very square that way. We also get our oil changed regularly and floss. Still, with so many other shoppers out there, loading up their carts with bread and milk, there is a sort of feeding frenzy that sets in even with the most staid and sober of customers. “Smoked salmon!” Nancy says, her eyes aglaze, “We’re all out of smoked salmon!” “Pot stickers!” I reply, with the dizzying intensity of the delusional, “What if we run out of pot stickers!”
And so we leave the Costco with a flatbed cart, and stuff our truck with comestibles until the tires threaten to burst.
I for one am tired of the sort of superior Yankee (Now don’t get offended, I didn’t say “Damn Yankee.”) who rolls his eyes and says, “Four inches, phaugh, back in New Jersey…” Or Philadelphia, or Boston, or wherever. And then comes a story about dealing with real snow and driving to work through six-foot drifts and what a bunch of cold-weather weenies Georgians are and how we don’t know how to drive on icy roads and how a few flakes make us act like it’s the end of the world and everything shuts down.
I never think to remind these people they live in Georgia now and that presumably part of the reason they came here was to get away from weather like this. Maybe in Minnesota they’re putting on their light windbreakers, digging their cars out of the snowanks, and going to work like normal.
Here in Atlanta, I’m taking the day off, eating pot stickers and salmon, and admiring the winter wonderland outside.
Who do you think has the right approach?
