As you in the Southeast are settling in for what promises to be an entertaining couple of days, and those of you in the UK and the rest of Europe are suffering through a miserable winter (wettest winter in more than 200 years in England?!), I am really glad that today I am only dealing with cold and leftover snow. My Dad's town got 14 inches last week, making my whining about only 8 rather inappropriate in comparison!
My Dad has promised my brother and I that he will write us an email every day, so we know he is okay. The added benefit of this is that he has to figure out something to write about and the emails have included reminiscences of the cars he has owned, movies he watches (and how terrible most of them are), his conversations with my Mom or other people (the librarian, former colleagues), and autobiographical stories. These are often wonderful tales of Europe in the 1950s (when he taught soldiers on bases across many countries), what the town we grew up with was like in the 1960s (when my brother and I were little), and growing up during the Great Depression in Boston.
I think his writing is often lovely and rather lyrical and I have shared some of his comments here before. As we are dealing with winter, and he has been as well, he wrote about Boston and New York snowstorms a few days ago. I wanted to share a few of his thoughts with you, so with his permission (below the orange frosty swirl) are some thoughts about winters past and present.
...What I set out to say was that the snow was coming down heavily as I drove home, and there was enough left over from the huge storm of earlier in the week that it was dangerous to slide into a skid on slight hills, and to really slide if the angle of descent was more than slight. Which caused me to rethink my attitude toward snowstorms. This has been a dramatic process of readjustment since my childhood. New England’s storms were so ferocious and constant as part of winter’s terrors that I did not consider it anything out of the ordinary to be stuck on a streetcar for ten hours because huge piles of snow prevented movement one night when I was returning from selling newspapers in downtown Boston, or getting stuck up to my hips in a snowdrift on a side street leading to Lorne Street (my home was one floor of a three-decker on that street) -- I had to be rescued by someone who, walking home on the other side of the street, saw my dilemma and crossed over to pull me free.
Before I ever owned a car I traveled by various kinds of transportation, and one year, in Christmas Week, I went to New York to see a publisher about my first novel (only to have a reader tell me that I was one of his very best rejected authors) and got caught up in a 27” snowfall, which impressed even blasé New Yorkers. Times Square was as hushed as a cathedral. Only a tiny number of cars could be seen on the full length of Broadway, from 42nd to 50th Streets.
Living in College Park, Maryland, for several years, Mom and I were deceived by several mild winters in a row (milder than what I had known in Boston, for sure).
Nevertheless, on the rare occasion when a few inches hit and everything ground to a halt, it was more than it was worth to try driving. I remember vividly returning from Ft. Meade, where I had gone to teach the principles of grammar to a couple dozen soldiers, with many miles to go before I could sleep, and driving in slippery fashion around stalled cars and trying to see through a snow-blinded windshield (Highway 1 was especially risky, because some huge trucks, including tankers, had turned sideways); that was a real night to remember.
So Kansas is much more pleasant than almost anywhere on the East Coast during this Polar frostiness – except for this year, which is savage in its determination to set records, and may be a portent of future climate change of terrifying dimension. Cross your fingers, because [where you and your brother live] are not immune. And are those snowflakes that even now are cluttering up the windowpane?