Brew Sledding
Telemarking, shredding, bindings – I know these words, I just have no clue what they are or what they mean. You see, I grew up in the South. I have spent my life in North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia, so I am terrified of snow. Don’t get me wrong, it is pretty at first and I always consider it a rare treat to see everything blanketed in white, but after the novelty wears off then comes the fear.
In the South we don’t know what to do when it snows. Well, I take that back. We think we know what to do. For example, five days before the slightest chance of a wintery mix, we all rush to the grocery store and load up on milk and bread. Even if we usually don’t eat bread or drink milk, we still buy it because that is what you do when it might snow. Two days before a potential storm we check to make sure our flashlights have batteries inside them for when the power goes out, then the day before the possible threat we fill our bathtubs with water for when our faucets no longer work.
Jen Sledding
After that we feel relatively prepared so we sit under five blankets and watch the windows and the weather channel to monitor the incoming front. In the morning there is typically a light dusting on the ground. And thank goodness we did all that prep work, because at that point everything shuts down. Schools shut down, people avoid driving for several days, and for the rest of the year people can talk about what they did when the big storm came.
The thing is, this year it actually happened, we actually got a big storm. And it came out of nowhere! All of a sudden on Thursday the news forecasters predict a snowstorm that would come in overnight. (Maybe they are waiting til the last minute now, because of their inaccuracy in the past?) Then, the next morning, we woke up to several inches of white fluff on the ground and throughout the day the snow kept falling and falling and falling. When it finally stopped, we had a foot-and-a-half outside our house – the last time I experienced something like this I was 9 years old! This was a Christmas miracle… and a nightmare.
Brew and Jen
I hadn’t made it to the store before Thursday, I didn’t have my milk and bread, my bathtub wasn’t full of water, and my flashlights were nowhere to be found. My husband and I don’t even have “snow clothes.” It is true that NC, VA and WV do all have some “decent” snow slopes, but my speed threshold is 6 miles per hour, and other skiers don’t like it when I zig-zag in front of them a million times going down the green slopes, so we avoid the resorts, and the gear. But I did have hiking gear, so with rain pants over leggings and a big puffy jacket, my husband Brew and I went out to explore the new world.
There were so many cars on the side of the road that it literally looked like a scene from Armageddon. Amid the chaos, however, we found some friends with sleds and decided to give the whole winter sports thing another try. Brew and I sledded until we had snow in all our clothes and our fingers felt like icicles. We had races, we gave each other style points, but mostly we just laughed when the other person wiped out.
When we finally went back inside to warm up, we turned on the lights, took a shower, enjoyed a hot cup of cocoa and then curled up to watch a movie.
So while I’m still not ready to move to the North or to the West, I have to admit, I hope that it is a lot less than 15 years until we get another foot of snow. ; )
Just Jen...
