Then Came The Snow

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” said one friend. The “they” in this case was the weatherman on a local tv station, someone who had taken a course in the subject and had AccuWeather as a backup. In other words, the guy did indeed know what he was talking about, at least in this case.

He was talking about ten inches. Ten inches he talked about and ten inches we got. All white, all fluffy and all cold.

You see, there had been three storms earlier in the season, all of which slipped by to the south and went up to the two News: Jersey and York. What did we get out of them? About an inch, maybe two. One of them was a dusting and I’ve seen more dust on the top of this machine than was on my sidewalk.

“Expect six to ten inches overnight,” said the man on the screen. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said the man on the couch next to me. I just sat there, confident in what I had seen on the Doppler radar map, showing a snow storm heading our way, just entering the county. “We shall see,” I said to myself.

Came the morning, all ten inches of it. Just yesterday, people were in full riot gear as they stormed the stores grabbing at more bread and milk than they needed for a week. The streets would be cleared by the next day, but you can’t have too much bread and milk; it’s a primeval need throwback to our cavepeople past.