Someone ought to publish recipes that ice-constrained menus go into effect. What do you do with so much milk and bread?
We didn’t shop for a week and survived, so far as I know. Once the initial surprise snowstorm has snowed itself out and only then does hunger strike little boys who are drenched and red-cheeked, and the snowstorm itself history.
We got regular updates on the part of the storm that bulldozed metro-Washington, D.C., and tried to ignore the infamy of “snow on snow, snow on snow on snow.” When your grandsons have two feet of the stuff in their yard, it seems a bit pathetic to tell them that G-ma’s and G-pa’s place got nearly two inches, with drifting to 3-½. Inches.
We have always been on the southeastern sweep of bad weather, from when we realized that being just west of Harrisburg, Penna, meant we were shadowed, in a sense, from bad weather out of the west and north.
When we lived in southern New Jersey, it seemed as though the only bad (or good?) weather we got was usually petering out before it so much as dusted the land east and south of Philadelphia.
So now, of course, the pattern has swung out of our favor at all. We’re south and east of Atlanta, where snow is truly exceptional. Curses, Red Baron! Foiled again!
Never lost power and never got really serious winds. Cold it was, so the thing to do was what we did, staying put and inching the gas-log flames up just a little. You heard it here first, “This is the best part of retirement, not HAVING to go anywhere.”
Unabashed Über-consumers that we are, we had only one storm-related chore, and that was to buy a new electric mattress pad. The old one just stopped working and begged replacement. Naturally, just in time for the furnace to roar almost incessantly.
We feel like we could live forever on a pre-warmed mattress which stayed warm all night, grinning foolishly as two little kids, scrootching around to find nothing but toasty surfaces and feeling so smug.
By now we had a number of errands to run, none storm-driven, and we stopped at or phoned every place we could think of, to see if they still had an electric mattress pad to sell a couple of old fools grieving the demise of their own. After several hours and feeling chilled to the bone, we made one last foray into the Kmart in our own neighborhood, and guess what! You got it, there were two such pads: in Queen size, thermostat-controlled, with deep pockets for the mattress to tuck in right.
Seems like it took hours to work out which way the wires run, but other than that, all was well and we went to bed early, just to see how it was going to feel under our flimsy legs. Now we’re looking at a new storm on the way, but we’re ready.
Life is good.
[Sallie Satterthwaite of Peachtree City has been writing for The Citizen since our first issue Feb. 10, 1993. Before that she had served as a city councilwoman and as a volunteer emergency medical technician. She is the only columnist we know who has a fire station named for her. Her email is SallieS@Juno.com.]
