Snow Days

Ed and I talk about a lot of things. Family. Sports. School. We’ve often talked about the minitramp story that I told you about yesterday.

Heading into January, one of our frequent topics is winter weather. We talk a lot about snow days.

Recently, we remembered one year that we had so much snow in January it caused us to go to school on a Saturday to make up time. During our eighth grade year, we missed pretty much the entire month of January save a random day here or there in-between snow systems. We added an hour of school each day for three weeks to make up lost time. I remember the teachers added a unit on career planning.

I think that was also the year my mom and I both had the flu and basically took turns taking care of each other on week. Fortunately, I didn’t miss any school because of the illness.

Another time, I recall missing the last day of school before the Christmas break. That morning I had sacked up all the Christmas gifts to take to school that. I wound up lugging them home from the bus stop later when the bus didn’t show up. Only then did my mom and I learn that school had been called off.

Something similar happened during my senior year in high school. I remember trying to drive to school and not making it. I struggled home and found out school had been dismissed. One of my friends and I hiked over to Cedar Bluff to pick up my sister and walk her home.

The winters of our school years were really severe. Lots of cold weather; tons of snow.

Compare and contrast that to our current January. Sunny and 50 degrees yesterday. Forecast high for this upcoming Saturday of 69 degrees! Clearly, this ain’t your grandfather’s winter. Or my dad’s, for that matter.

I’m not going to dive into the debate about global warming. You can get plenty of information about that elsewhere. But there’s no debating the fact that, recently, our winters haven’t been very…well…wintery.

But you don’t have to go back to our eighth grade year to find some decent winters.

For example, the year Holly turned one, we experienced The Blizzard of ’93 and she enjoyed checking it out.

Three years later, when Paul was one, we had another fairly decent snow. I remember that one. It came right at the end of winter break, so we all got a couple extra days tacked on to our early January downtime.

As the kids were growing up, it seemed like we had a few decent snows along the way. They love to tell the story about riding their sleds on our current street. I even remember they had a decent ‘fun’ snowball fight out front.

That won’t be the case this week. And, it really looks like it won’t be the case anytime soon. Unless we get a drastic shift in our winter weather patterns, it doesn’t look like we are going to have “The Blizzard of ’13!”

JG

Originally posted 1/8/2013