Just when I was thinking I’d make it through February without seeing snow again, it snowed. And it kept snowing. The stuff was falling pretty steadily when I woke up this morning and discovered that I had no food in my apartment.
And when I looked out my window and saw that my street (which happens to be on a maybe-forty-degree incline) was bleached-white, I knew I’d continue to have no food in my apartment for a while, because I’d be damned if I was going out in that.
Yeah, I’d have to go to the supermarket eventually, but I figured I’d wait for the snow to stop first. But when one p.m. rolled around and the rate of snowfall seemed utterly unchanged, I realized there’d be no getting around it: I’d have to man up and face the elements.
It doesn’t snow often in the Midwest. When it does, we’ll get perhaps a foot of it at most, and that’s a far cry from the volume people on the east coast have to deal with.
Yet that’s exactly what makes snow here so annoying: snow in the Midwest comes about just infrequently enough that productivity grinds to a halt every time it appears. Everyone’s perplexed and weirded out. We all have to take a moment to remember what snow is, and what to do when it comes around.
Not many people take prophylactic measures against it. At least, I sure as hell don’t. I don’t wrap chains around my tires or carry an ice scraper in the trunk.
It’s true that they salt the roads here, but I don’t think they do it with the necessarily-ruthless efficiency employed elsewhere. When I was a kid growing up in Springfield, they used to shut all the schools down every time there was so much as a centimeter of snow.
But before Springfield, I lived in West Chester, Pennsylvania. And over there, snow days more or less didn’t exist. No matter how ridiculous the previous night’s snowfall, plows would hit the streets at four a.m. and annihilate the bulk of it. Over there, snow was no big deal.
In Kansas City, just six inches of snow can gum the works up like nothing else. To drive to the supermarket in this weather is to travel at fifteen miles per hour and watch everyone else doing the same, their cars all taking part in a bizarre slow-mo ballet. It’s maybe beautiful, if you’ve got a loose definition of the term “beautiful.”
Tomorrow’s the first day of March. By Google’s estimation, it’s supposed to get up into the forties and stay there. This being Missouri, all bets are off, but that’d be nice.
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