Yesterday morning I awoke to find my world was turning white.

I have to tell you – but please keep it quiet because I know not everyone felt the way I felt…

I was so excited!

It has been a nearly snowless winter in the northeast and just the day before I opened my back door to let the ShepHerds out and it was sixty degrees.

Sixty!

There are many days in a normal February when I wake up to minus 10 degree mornings! This was crazy. Seriously, ‘spanky baby Jesus‘ cray.

And there were many people – and many of these people were dear friends of mine – who were ecstatic about no snow.  And I mean ‘seriously could not stop celebrating’ ecstatic.

Not me.

But then guess what?!

Yesterday!!!

In just that one day my world went from blah and brickle-y brown to whimsical and wintry white just like that!

Well, not quite just like that.

Because first I needed my hair attended to.

And no ‘hey stay off the roads if you can’ winter-y weather was going to prevent that I tell you (and you totally get this if you are a woman with roots the delightful color of I-don’t-know-what with silver highlights).

Fine.

Grey highlights.

So off into the snow I went to meet my friend Kim-the-incredible-stylist.

And I am telling you that we all – yes, we all, every single one of us and you should know the truth – make fun of people who live anywhere south of us (which includes Rhode Island, not just Virginia and the Carolinas and all those states south of us that are beyond the Appalachian Mountains).

Actually, we don’t even know what those states are.  Because, in the Northeastern schools, they don’t even make us memorize the states over the Appalachian Mountains in school. Seriously. We know that the world stops at Pennsyl…  Pencil… Penn… aw, Hell, they didn’t even teach us about the states beyond the eastern border of those frappin’ mountains. All we know is that the Appalachian Trail ends up in Maine.

And begins in the province of Georgia.

Which I think is in France.

Anyway, we all make fun of people who live south of us and scream and cry and hole up in their houses for weeks if even an inch of snow falls on them or a town within 50 miles of them. And we giggle when we see all the cars of the people who try to drive strewn all willy-nilly over the roads. And we talk about you behind your back.

No we don’t.

We don’t even try to hide it.

But here is the thing, and no one tells you this but it is absolutely true…

It takes about 242.3 days (that’s a mathematical reality) for the average Northeastern-er to forget – and I mean totally fugue-state-like forget – that, at the end of last winter, he or she was scoffing at warnings that 3 feet of snow was about to fall, with wind chill factors of minus 57 degrees farenheit (and also there would probably be a tornado).

“No prob!” the Northeastern-er would say, and then he would get in his car and drive to get a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, just to get out of the house.

But fast forward 242.3 days from the first tulip poking its head out of the ground, or geese showing back up from their southern vacation?

Everyone forgets how to drive in the snow.

It’s chaos.

Even with an inch or so.

So don’t let us bully you southern people way down in Rhode Island or over in Cantucky anymore. The only thing we have over you guys is muscle memory. By the second or third storm in a row, we are riding our ten-speeds through nineteen-foot snow drifts in Bermuda shorts listening to the Beach Boys singing about having fun fun fun ’till our daddys take our t-birds away.

But the first storm?

Well, let me tell you.

Yesterday I was almost late for my hair appointment because I was behind a man who couldn’t figure out that his souped up Ford Mustang was not a monster truck and he could not just punch the gas pedal without turning at least 180 degrees in the middle of the road.

And he did it… multiple times.

And that was at the beginning of the storm.

When I got out of my appointment, I stopped at the supermarket (there was plenty of bread and water and milk, mostly because we’re pretty hardy and just head out in blizzards to the nearest cow and milk it, and also we Northeastern-ers can make bread out to tree bark and deer deliver buckets of water to our back doors in exchange for salt licks).

But on the way home?

On the way home I got stuck behind a box truck who could not get up an approximately 3 degree incline in the narrow roadway that exited the supermarket.  Seriously, I had to turn around.

And then, when I did and went to the main road, I came upon a city bus – one of those big suckers – that was sideways all across multiple lanes.

But, luckily, there was a guy in Bermuda shorts directing traffic.

I’m just kidding.

He wasn’t directing traffic.  But I did manage to get around the big bus and was on my way home.

Oh! And I forgot! I brought my camera just for you!

Oh, and also? Sometimes a storm will last all night, but this one didn’t. It ended as the sun was setting and….

See?

Not too shabby.

Thanks for readin’.

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