Winter Weather

For the first time since I’ve lived in North Carolina, a major snowfall seems likely to happen in our area. It’s been plastered all over the media for two days now, and we started to see moisture come from the sky early this morning.

Everyone who lives here seems to think this is a sign of impending doom, significant snow being such an unusual event. Hickory is in the “foothills” of the mountains, which is to say that the horizon is much, much too close for someone who grew up on the plains, but we still have to travel to actually be “. . . in the mountains,” with ski slopes and things like that.

This means that winter usually lurks in the background, like the hint of carrot in a carrot cake, enticing but not overwhelming.

Enticing, assuming you’re a fan of winter.  If you're not it just sucks.

Human behavior about the weather is therefore somewhat puzzling. At the first hint that there might – maybe-- possibly – be snow somewhere within a 100 mile range, everyone immediately runs to the grocery store to buy bread and milk.

It would seem to me that the more important thing is that the power stay on. Central heat, lights and the internet all seem to require this magical elixir of current for us to stay comfortable.  Peanut Butter sandwiches and cereal I can do without.

After all, electric blankets are kind of pointless in a power outage.

And of course, without power for refrigerators all the milk that people rushed out to buy will spoil.

We seldom got big snows in Oklahoma City when I was growing up. More frequently there was bad weather at the farm near Woodward, but that was just a bit of an inconvenience for my grandparents, not a major problem. With little to slow the wind from the North Pole other than a barbed wire fence, snow drifts could be a problem with even a few inches of precipitation.

One year they had a major snowstorm. Phones were always spotty, so of course they went down at the first sign of an icicle. Power was more reliable, but even it was off and on. With houses so far apart, electricity could easily be on in one location but not at another.

My grandparents were fortunate to be surrounded by caring neighbors as well. Grandpa was a paraplegic, having contracted polio in the late 1940’s and was confined to a wheelchair thereafter. Grandma was a tiny little woman who took care of him and did the physical operation of the farm. They lived a mile and a quarter off of the “blacktop”, an unlined 2-lane road that went from one rural community to the other.

The day after this big snowstorm, they heard a four-wheel drive vehicle laboriously making it’s way down the dirt road from the black top. It sounded as though it was in and out of the ditch several times, and finally pulled up to the door over an hour and a half later.

Out popped two members of their church, gentlemen who were worried about them and decided to bring them food and to make sure they didn’t need anything. To say this stunned Grandma and Grandpa is an understatement.

The guys came into the house to find a pot of vegetable soup simmering on the woodburning stove. This was frequently how she warmed her soup that had been made and home canned summers before, so the fact that the electricity had gone out wasn’t especially troubling to Grandma.

The soup was for supper, but things were far enough along on the propane powered stove towards dinner (the mid-day meal) that they invited them to stay.

Typically, this would have been something along the lines of steak in mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, a vegetable or two, hot homemade rolls and either cake or pie for desert. Grandma was used to cooking as if there were numerous hungry farmhands expecting to be fed.  Extra people appearing at mealtime seldom had to worry about leaving hungry.

Grandpa, for his part, was dumbfounded that anyone would even think they needed help. The only inconvenience he’d noticed was that he couldn’t read the daily newspaper, since it was brought by the postman and there was no mail delivery due to the weather. He was reading magazines by the light of the kerosene lantern that had been brought in and returned to service.

Their condition was secure in part because they had two cellars – one, a traditional cellar with steps to go underground, that had a wall easily ten feet in each direction that was lined with shelves, crammed full of home-canned fruit and vegetables from their garden. Potatoes, onions and other root vegetables were in boxes and overflowing onto the floor as well.

The other cellar, built into a dirt bank next to the house, was dubbed the “pillbox” and was more convenient because his wheelchair rolled right into it whenever there was inclement weather. It was a lot more like an extra bedroom than a cellar. This always had a huge freezer that held whatever couldn’t be home canned, along with whatever beef, pork or chicken Grandma had stockpiled.

For two elderly people who ate little, they could easily have lasted months without leaving their house. To think that they needed food brought to them was kind of silly.

The guys from the church probably realized this pretty quickly, especially when they returned up the dirt road with big mason jars of the hot soup for their own suppers later that evening.

It’s very different than the panic which ensues at the first sign of a snowflake in the Carolinas, a condition which is observed with some confusion by all those who have migrated from locations north.

And as much as I hate to buy into it, I have to go to the grocery store before the weather hits and we get snowed in.

Not for bread and milk, which we could live without for 24 hours. But for Coffee, without which we cannot.

Besides, the shelves were long ago emptied of bread and milk.