1. When your colleague brings you a piece of pie, eat it immediately, even if it's breakfast time. Your ancestors ate pies for every meal, practically. Feel free to use silverware, however, even if they did not. You never know when you'll get another piece of homemade pie.
2. Remain skeptical about the "big snows" that are coming into town. You've heard of these big snows before, and they're not always all that. You remember 1979, and the photo where the drifts were taller than your dad's Olds. That was a real snow.
3. Try your best to be patient with people who forget how to drive in the snow every year. This patience need not, however, extend to students using umbrellas to keep snow out of their hair. That's just crazy bullshit.
4. Even if there's no whale blubber available to rub on your children's cheeks when you take them outdoors, that organic rosemary baby lotion will do the trick. Needless to say, you can carry two kids at once, if necessary. You can also yell at them loud enough so that the snow plow can pass and they'll still hear you loud and clear.
5. If you get snowed in, put blankets all over the hardwood floors and have a picnic. Let your many, many pets hunker down with you. Lunch will very likely include tater tots, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's all part of the tradition. You've gotta pass it on.
Any other rust belt gals care to add to this survival guide?
11 comments:
My plan involves:
1) Waiting until all the crazies go home before walking to my car
2) Going through the taco bell drive-thru for survival supplies
3) Drinking Baileys while putting together submission packets (here's hoping I don't spill!)
I lament the advent of anti-lock braking systems, as they have rendered obsolete the "pump and steer opposite" system of snowstorm braking.
Also, New York is rife with umbrellas during a snow (not that we've had any this season). It infuriates me.
I just have to comment that I am extremely amused by the accuracy and humor.
And cannot come up with anything else.
Some times, snow is more memory than fact.
How can you tell?
It's simple mostly.
First, look at the snow from any window, but one high up is better. Watch for tell tales, signs that it's there.
For instance, cars.
Are there any moving on the street?
If they are, than the snow is nothing to worry about.
It's mainly fact and not memory.
Here's another tell tale.
Boots. You got them on your feet?
Do they feel warm? Good. Now go outside, and from a slight height, just drop yourself in the snow.
If it's there when you land and you can feel the crust break as you fall through, then it's the real.
It ain't no memory of snow.
So what's a memory of snow?
If you can't remember,than the snow's just a fact.
The snows of memory are the ones you got to worry about.
Two additions:
1. As much as you may love the roar and stink of the snowblower, it feels like cheating, and you shovel the driveway anyway.
2. You do so sans gloves and hat, even if it's raining and your pigtails get waterlogged.
Eff all that noise. I'm moving south.
I live south, in Georgia, way down south in Georgia, just north of the Suwannee River.
It's beautiful.
I have a house I'm selling. 110 year old victorian. Completely redone! 4600 sq feet.
If you google 412 river street valdosta, georgia, you'll see about a million pictures.
Asking price $319,000. But a discount for poets and writers!!
In New England you:
1. Judge time of year by whether or not the plow has relocated your mailbox to another state, mail still inside.
2. Welcome snowstorms because the piles along the roadside are like bumpers in bowling alleys--who cares if it is slippery, you are so not leaving the road.
3. Keep ice cream in the freezer so when the power fails you can live on that, must in fact, live on that or let it go to waste.
4. Keep score. New Yorkers who come up to ski aren't worth much because they are way too easy.
5. Keep your laptop charged so when the power fails you can set it up across the room, curl under a blanket, put a DVD in, and pretend you are at the drive-in.
1. You don't even panic when your truck throws a rod on the highway in the snow and you zig-zag to the exit.
2. You don't even care that the tow-truck driver is drunk and named Buck; your toes are frozen.
3. You think English needs more words for snow.
For John Guzlowski: Does the house come with water? I heard Georgia was running out.
Water!?!?!
Amy, my friend, we are up to our elbows in the stuff.
South Georgia is swamp. You heard of the Okeefenokee Swamp? That's 1,000,000 acres of wet swamp mulch. We got alligators walking our streets; we got bears padding through our backyards in red galoshes.
I see them every day. Twice on Sundays.
Valdosta, where I live, is the only dry spot within a hundred miles.
You got to go take I-75 down to Gainesville, Fl, or up to Macon, Georgia (home of the rockingest rocker ever: Little Richard[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlkMc0ZaJmY&feature=related], to see a dry spot. And when you see that dry spot, it extends for 400 miles past Atlanta up to Chattanooga and beyond. Almost as far as the Cumberland Gap, famous in song and legend.
And that dry spot is drier than my mother's biscuits.
Fact is, the folks up there in Atlanta are talking about running a pipe line down to my "for sale" house at 412 River Street, Valdosta, Georgia, 31601, to get the water out of my back yard.
Me and my neighbors are standing ready with our 16-gauge shotguns.
No body is taking our water!
Our water? It's like poetry and gold.
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