Both Sides Now - Reflections on Snow.

For the first 15 years of my life I lived in Odenton, an unincorporated little burg on the Pennsylvania Railroad line between Baltimore and Washington in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It seemed to me that we had a lot of snow during those years (1953-68) but now I'm not so sure. The biggest deal I remember was the Blizzard of '66, which dumped three feet of snow over a weekend in February. Add to that the fact that Troop 721, including my dad and I, were camping out that weekend, and it's no wonder it is etched on my memory. We had to tunnel out of our tents, then dig our way out of the campground on Sunday morning. Then we were out of school for a whole week.

The primary snow-related recreation  was sledding. Our back yard had a gentle slope from the edge of the woods down to the driveway. In the early years on Hammond Lane, our best sledding was there. Soon, however, the new Junior High School was built a quarter mile away, and the grounds around it offered several excellent hills. As soon as there was enough snow to sled on, we kids - about seven to ten of us - hitched up our wooden sleds with steel runners and dragged them to the Junior High. Usually four or five times per winter (sez my 63-year-old memory) we were blessed with enough snow for sledding.

Then we moved to Vero Beach, Florida. In 1977 there was a hard freeze that shut down the citrus industry for ten days. It snowed, but not enough for sledding. Not enough for a decent snowball.

In 2005 Carmen and I moved to Massachusetts. We had heard about New England winters, and learned that the rumors were true. Especially our last winter there, 2008-09, the snow just never seemed to stop. In four years, I saw kids sledding only once, which was perplexing.

Then we moved to Albuquerque, where the news media gave us dire warnings of horrific winter storms coming. They'd blow through overnight, dump 3/4 of an inch of snow and move on. By 9:00 it was all melted, and by noon the world was as dry as ever - and that's pretty dry. There was nary a sled in town.

On the opposite side of the coin...Meadville, Pennsylvania, the moss-covered buckle of the lake effect snow belt. The average is 120 inches (that's ten feet to you and me) of snow per year, and for the first two years I never saw anyone sledding. Very perplexing. Then we got a dog who required long walks three times a day, taking us to parts of Meadville I'd never seen before. It turned out that there were kids who went sledding when the weather was good. They weren't there frequently, but at least four or five times per winter.

Now we have landed in Nashville, Tennessee. This past Wednesday night the rain turned to sleet and snow. By morning there was a quarter inch on the ground and next to nothing on the roads, and on Thursday we were warned to stay off the roads. We former Meadvillians laughed at that. Then on Friday morning we woke up to a half inch of snow that kept on coming down. By the end of the morning dog walk, it was about 3 inches deep. During the afternoon walk, it was approaching 8 inches and still coming down, and everywhere we went there were kids (and grown-ups too) dragging sleds along the unplowed and unsalted streets, heading for the hills. Every decent hill we saw had kids (and grown-ups too) sledding on them. By last night (Sunday) the hills were showing dirt due to the hundreds of downhill runs over the snow, and still kids were sledding well past dark. It began to dawn on me.

In Odenton, Maryland, maybe four or five times a year there was enough snow to sled on. In Nashville, Tennessee, 8 inches is the most snow people have seen in decades. In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, if you skip the sledding today or tomorrow, there will be another opportunity the next day, or next week, or next month at the latest. Wait for a nice sunny day, not too cold.

And that, my friends is what I have learned from Snowmageggon 2016.