Snow Days

We're actually having a winter this year here in my corner of Tennessee. For the first time in years it's cold for several days at once and we've had a few snow events which were bad enough to have most of the local school systems cancel classes for a few days in a row. Even Sparky's employer has called off classes and closed their offices due to the inclement weather a couple of times this winter.

For the past four or five years we've had no winter to speak of. It's been warmish from December right through to February. Yes, we had a cold day once in awhile but no string of them and we had hardly any snow. But it wasn't always like that around here.

It started snowing on Christmas day in 1976 when I was living at Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery's farm in Lee County VA and it snowed on and off for the next four weeks. About four inches of snow fell that Christmas day and we were all so excited because we had the next week off to play in it. As the snow fell so did the temperatures, it did not get above freezing for weeks at a time.

Most cities and counties north of the Mason Dixon line know how to do adequate snow removal but in the rural mountainous counties of southwest Virgina/northeast TN the county road crews were not prepared for what hit us that year. The snows fell fast and furious the last week of December and for most of January. And because the road crews could not plow and salt all the roads to a degree that allowed school buses to travel safely on them, when it came time to go back to school after the holidays, school was cancelled.

We lived out in the middle of nowhere there in Lee County on a road that got plowed and salted maybe once a week if we were lucky. I was too young to have my drivers license so I was stuck at home and at the mercy of others when it came to going places. About all I could do was watch the snow fall, watch TV, read, or do chores.

Those were the dark ages back then late 1976/early 1977 entertainment wise. Cable TV was something fancy la dee daa people in big cities had, we had four over the air channels on our TV, NBC out of Bristol, ABC out of Knoxville, CBS out of Johnson City, and PBS out of a phone booth in Sneedville TN. And our TV had no remote, you had to get up and change the channel and if the reception was bad you had to go outside and turn a huge antenna, which we had to have because we lived so far out in the middle of nowhere, until the picture came in decently. VCR's were not big back in 1977 either, they weighed something like 900 pounds and they cost about a million dollars, okay I exaggerate but I'm not too far off. If you wanted to see movies you went to a movie theatre, which meant driving over the mountain to Kingsport, TN, the nearest 'big' town near us at that time. So basically for fun and entertainment we watched shitty 1970's TV, read books, I remember I re-read The Hobbit and the first book and a half of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, read comic books that we had read a million times already, and listen to albums by Yes, Rick Wakeman, Alan Parsons, and other bloated bombastic schlock and roll groups.

At first being off from school was kind of fun. We'd go out and make snowmen, sled down the mountain, go cave exploring, build bonfires, have snowball fights, and hike around the farm. But as the days wore on boredom over took us. I hadn't started smoking cigarettes yet, let alone pot, and I hadn't begun my life long love affair with beer at that point so I couldn't self medicate my way out of the boredom. So we began to pick at one another. You know what I mean, all of us teens would start fights over petty things and soon they would escalate in to shouting matches and then Aunt Rageaholic would step in punish me or my sister, even if her kids were at fault. By the end of the second week of January I felt like I was stuck in a hellish stage play by Jean Paul Sartre.

Outside the snow kept piling up, the cold kept coming, and they kept cancelling school. Then just as things were really bleak, unsettling, and at their worst, something happened that almost drove us all over the edge, Aunt Rageaholic's menopausal rages began. Imagine being trapped in a cage with a mountain lion that is pissed off and hasn't eaten for weeks. Being trapped in that cage would have been a picnic compared with life with my menopausal aunt. She'd fly into a rage if you breathed too loudly, laughed at something she did not find funny, or wore clashing plaids. Anything and everything we did pissed her off more than usual. It was then and there that I learned the meaning of the phrase 'walking on eggshells.'

We got a three day reprieve from her madness when she had to drive my cousin back to college in Berea KY. The snow was falling faster than stock values are falling in today's shitty economy when they set out for Berea College that day. She brushed aside suggestions that she wait a day before driving up there, she was master of the elements she insisted and a little snow didn't scare her, so she made all of us kids, all 6 of us, pack the car for her trip. I was secretly praying that she would not cancel and when she pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road we stood at the window and cheered like the people of Paris cheered when the Allies took it back from the Nazi's. About three hours later she called and said they got as far as Jonesville, which was about 15 miles from the farm, and they were going to have to stay in a motel over night before setting out again the next day.

We had a three day party without her. We stayed up late, played board games, stayed on the phone for hours, ate pounds of bacon, scores of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank gallons of orange Kool Aid, and we scarfed down our body weights in cold cereal. Somehow she knew we had too much fun while she was gone so when she got back she made our lives a living hell once more, but nothing she could do could take back the fun we had while she was away.

Towards the end of the third week of being off from school the temperature suddenly shot up one night and a warm wind kicked up. It was almost eerie walking outside and being almost knee deep in snow while a 60 degree wind flew down the valley at us. When we woke up the next day there were hundreds of snow wheels on the ground. They looked like this except for the fact that they were laying flat. They were all over our farm and in town as well. People freaked out and some said it was a sign that the end of times was at hand, which made me laugh.

The snow wheels did turn out to be a sign though, they were a sign that the snow and cold had been broken and a week later we were all back in school and I was never so happy to be free from my crazy menopausal aunt and her psycho kids. Our high school tried like hell to cram in all the stuff we missed over January but it was to no avail because at the end of February/early March the rains started to fall, the creeks and rivers began to rise, and we were out of school for another two weeks due to flooding.