“Snow brings a special quality with it—the power to stop life as you know it dead in its tracks.”                 — Nancy Hatch Woodward

Ahhh, winter in the South. The first chance of snow is upon us if the weather liars are to be believed. It’s 24 degrees this morning according to my Dollar Tree thermometer. I’m guessing it could be off a degree or ten but for Southerners used to 40-degree lows, twenty-five ain’t no joke. Anyway, the coming weekend may be interesting.

The mere mention of snow sends Southerners running amok searching for bread and milk, beer, toilet paper…anything to survive the dusting of white stuff we may or may not get. There seems to be disagreement between our weather liars. We may get a dusting, or we may get twenty feet. We may get snow, sleet, freezing rain, a mix of all or nothing at all. I’ll worry if I hear they are gasin’ up the buses in Atlanta.

It is Wednesday as I write, and the apocalyptic event isn’t supposed to occur until this weekend. The end of the world is near, and I may have waited too long. You see, I really do need milk and toilet paper. I will brave Walmart’s Covid idiots later as I quest for the Holy Grail…I mean Charmin. I would go the Piggly Wiggly but I’m sure fights are breaking out there. Dollar General?

As my Southern peers run amok, they forget how to drive…not that they really knew how to drive in South Carolina in the first place. Blinker lights are a wasted option on most cars around here. Blinker lights would be Southern for turn signals. Don’t matter, most of us don’t know what they are used for anyway.

If this forecast comes to fruition the wrecker services will make a killing…that might be a poor choice of words. Southerners who can’t drive on dry pavement suddenly get the urge to go skiing in their Lexus.

Good ole boys with four-by-four pick-ups live for snow days. They will traverse the snow covered back roads, logging chains at the ready, hoping to find some poor soul to yank out of the ditch. They do it for free, just for the fun of it as if it is a Winter Olympic sport.

We’ve had major snow apocalypse events. The 1988 snowstorm that dumped seventeen inches and kept us out of school for a week. We had a VW bug and a Thunderbird and were ready to shoot holes in each other before we finally dug our way out.

In ’93 we had an ice storm that had a hurricane attached to it. We were stranded in Columbia and by the time we got back, days of temperatures in the teens and a power outage had turned my water tank into a flooding sieve. Most of my neighbors had left for the comfort of a nearby “Traveler’s Rest” …we joined them and might have been first in line at the Cracker Barrel when it opened back up.

I’ve lived in the South for seven decades and I still don’t understand Southerners when it comes to snow. Four inches of snow will shut us down quicker than Blue Laws on a Sunday in the 1950s. Most of the businesses will close as will the schools. The government shuts down, not that we would notice. All secondary roads will be deemed impassable, yet the foolish will prove that they are, in fact, impassable.

Why bread and milk? Barbeque and Jack Daniels are more suited for my taste, but I understand the fear this one-day event will somehow turn into weeks of isolation. Tales of the Donner Family spur fears of having to saw off a limb with a fingernail file and slow cooking it in the fireplace trying to stave off starvation.  I’ve been binge watching too much of the “Walking Dead.”

I know Northerners make fun of us. It is okay, just understand our snow is wet and slicker than owl poop, rarely do we get the powdery stuff. We have few snowplows and little salt for the roads, I mean we are talking about a once in a blue moon event. It is easier to stay in the house, in front of a roaring fire binge watching “The Walking Dead,” a mayonnaise sandwich in one hand and a glass of milk in the other, toilet paper stacked in the hallway.

Don Miller writes badly in many different genres. You may access his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR1Tvw-8KYL0NsHaUcJILjbYBtmfXp5TAhPHxRmTs1Z2OdN3D-A9yLds-yU

Blog image is of a typical Snow Apocalypse in the sunny South.