Southern snow

Scrounging for words as northern breezes whet the air and my emotions. Maddened by snow gods seems about right.

Solidly rooted as I am in this place, for a few weeks every summer I question my decision to remain.

If you live here, you’ve likely made peace with the summers by weighing the pros versus cons. This is a must-do or go mad situation. You understand that searing heat combined with stifling humidity are the dues you pay for wet-wade fishing in October, wildflowers blooming into December, and slipping into flip-flops by March. If you’re born here, your adjustment happens before memories even form, and you may never even realize that it is not like this everywhere until and unless you travel a bit. If you weren’t born here, you’ll get used to it.

Or you won’t. But that means becoming housebound for most of May through September.

Hellish summer weather is an excuse I’ve often employed to get me out of various tasks and obligations I did not want to do. But by and large heat and humidity have never kept me from doing what must be done. Or, more frequently, what I really want to do. Growing up with no air conditioning surely had something to do with this superpower. I’ll gripe and moan with the best of ‘em as I sit in useless drenching sweat (sweating in such high humidity is utterly useless because the sweat can’t evaporate, and the evaporation is where the cooling happens) on the porch with a cold one, but I’ve mowed acres of grass, cut ricks of firewood, loaded thousands of hogs on a truck, dribbled countless basketballs, stacked too many square bales, shot a hundred archery tournaments, and caught scads of fish in absolutely withering conditions.

Even as an acclimated native, though, I have limits. I hit those about August.

August is when rain is just a rumor. August is when fence lizards kick up dust clouds as they scamper across baked garden beds. Afternoons of triple-digit aridity seem impossible after mornings that make you wish you had gills. They’re not only possible, though, they are entirely probable.

Scratch that. They are inevitable.

August is when my tolerance melts. My demeanor darkens. And the sublime temperatures of those abbreviated summers to the north cast a green shade upon me. This is when I scan weather across the nation, hungry for hope, for some notion that change will come one day, that it can’t be like this forever and it’s not like this everywhere. While scrolling the maps, I’ll note that some folks are already feeling the first refreshing pushes of almost crisp, almost autumn-like air.

“Hell, Christine, the high temperature in Madison, Wisconsin, is gonna top out at 71 degrees today—71 degrees. Good lord, we haven’t seen 71 for even a freakin’ nighttime low since… since…”

I can never remember when. In August, I can’t remember or imagine what 71 degrees feels like without the aid of compressors and freon.

I grunt my displeasure and take a sip of black coffee, its hot bitterness a fraction of mine. I add an exclamation point to my rant in the form of a rhetorical question.

“Remind me why we live here?”

Then sometime during the following winter, we get three inches of snow combined with two nights of single-digit temps.

And I remember why.

Not that I’m immune to the romance, to the notion that snow in the South is like celestial sugar shaken down on His chosen by God’s own sifter—ethereal and ephemeral, exquisite and fleeting, a blessing.

I vividly recall those feelings from too many decades ago. I remember huddling around Granny’s old Warm Morning gas stove just minutes before the school bus was scheduled to arrive and still not sure if it would. I remember standing so close to the heater, toasting my jeans until the last second so I could sprint down the long dirt driveway before the cold clawed its way through denim and nipped at my legs as the bus rolled to a stop. I recall straining hard to impose my will on the voice in the radio, resolved to hear “Atkins Public Schools” among the list of closures as a reality.

As part of the feral generation raised outside, when those snow days happened (maybe twice a winter), nothing changed for us. Of course, we didn’t have proper cold-weather gear. We didn’t even know what proper gear was. Wonder Bread wrappers as “waterproof” shoe and Jersey glove covers aren’t some rural legend. We used them and they worked. Sort of. Though they never lasted long, we didn’t care. The snow would be gone in a day or two anyway, and who knows when we’d see any again.

But I was never a big fan of the cold. Southern born and bred trumped my thick-blooded northern European lineage. I always liked green things, and catching bugs, and lizards, and fish. But all of our fish and fishing went dormant with the first few frosts. Deer hunting was a second-tier pursuit back then, something to do when it was too cold for pursuing the finned ones.

A huge portion of its relegation was because hunting meant long sits on chilly mornings. I’d go because I liked being in the woods for so many reasons and deer barely qualified as one because there weren’t many deer around back then. But I could never put on enough clothes even for the relative mildness of November gun season. Looking back, I think the early autumn archery opener with its balmy afternoons and barely crisp mornings had as much to do with my picking up a bow as anything else.

Layered in waffled thermals, flannel, and finally dark green Dickies overalls, I’d shake and shiver in the predawn gray, praying hard for those warm rays to clear yonder ridge quickly so I could snuggle down into the browned oak leaves and let endothermics do the rest. Most of the time, I shortly fell asleep.

Of course, I would have shot at a deer, if one would have ever come around. And if it could have roused me from my mid-morning nap.

The anticipation of snow—from the first mention of even a remote possibility—was perhaps, even better than the actual event. My mother and father both came from dirt-road stock. Wood or gas stoves were all they had growing up, and after hearing stories about the do-or-possibly-die earnestness of cutting firewood and unreliability of gas (raise your hand if you’ve ever cursed a flaky pilot light and wrestled with a faulty thermocouple), I understand why they relied on electric heat in our house. Nostalgia finally caught them when I was somewhere in my early teens and they had a wood-burning insert installed. From that day forward, electric heat was banned in our home. I recall one grounding directly attributable to the distinct smell of an electric furnace freshly fired up. I did not want to split kindling that afternoon. And I forgot that Dad was working first shift that week.

But those old urges from my parents’ childhoods and much further back still prodded us to preparation. Mom made the grocery run for milk and eggs, but also extra popcorn, butter, and that savory favorite summer sausage. Dad checked antifreeze in the vehicles and made sure the three-wheeler was gassed up because we didn’t own a four-wheel-drive vehicle. And no matter what the weatherman said, the old Chevy truck and the Oldsmobile might be stuck in the driveway longer than the milk and eggs could hold out.

I’ve scrounged for words to express the heady sentiments I felt back then as northern breezes whetted the air along with my emotions and cold clouds shaded Crow Mountain. The thrumming energy of the imminent winter storm vibrating through me, through everyone and everything in its path made me feel giddy. That’s the best I can come up with.

“Giddy” might seem like a weirdly positive feeling as Arctic fury barrels toward you, but it’s nuanced, a sweet and sour sensation. “Giddy” originates from an Old English word that means “insane” or “possessed by a god.”

Maddened by snow gods seems about right.

Coming soon: Part 2