Yesterday, I had a dentist appointment and had to drive 21 miles for the “pleasure” of teeth-scraping and buffing because that’s where the closest dentist on my plan is. While there, “J” and I ran a few errands since we were in “the big city” of West Lebanon (population 14000).
It was 3pm on cyber-Monday, and our last stop was the supermarket to grab a few items we were running out of, especially my precious half & half for coffee. We do this because we only have a tiny over-priced market in our neck of the woods (literally) where half & half costs nearly 20% more, as does almost everything else.
When we pulled in, the supermarket parking lot was, simply put, a parking lot. It was packed as if it were Black Friday, and we had to park in the next to last spot on the periphery of purgatory. What the heck is going on?
And then it hit me:
The forecasters (meaning literally everybody) have been predicting several inches of snowfall since Thanksgiving. On Sunday morning, they were already cancelling events even though snow was not expected for at least another 48 hours. By the afternoon on Monday, it seemed like every school district in the region had cancelled school for Tuesday.
SNOWMAGEDDON was on the way!
Here I sit, before sunrise on STORMZILLA Tuesday, with 5-6 inches of snow in the forecast, it occurs to me that these behaviors were commonplace in New Jersey (the South) where we had spent the last thirteen winters. Packed parking lots and emptying shelves were the norm just prior to snow; toilet paper, bread, and milk were the hot commodities.
But this is northern New England! These people are supposed to scoff at winter forecasts and eat snow for breakfast!
And then I stop and smile. I remember my grandmother’s fantastical tales of growing up in New Hampshire. Stories of living on a little farm, riding on the back of Old Morandi the cow, the trials of the Great Depression, and having to walk up hill both ways with snow as high as our knees to get to the one room schoolhouse to start the fire in the potbelly stove. Then it occurred to me: Nothing has changed.
Winter isn’t coming.
It’s here!
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth? Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass?” Job 38:22-27
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