My heart sank as I watched the national weather service foretell of the enormous East Coast blizzard that hit mid December. To make matters worse, I was listening to this forecast from Chicago, on what was suppose to be a long anticipated, stress-free weekend getaway.
It started with a cryptic email weather warning from my mother just after we settled in from the airport. "I know you just got there, but maybe you should try to get a flight home. They are predicting a huge snowstorm and the airports will be closed". The only difference between my mother and TV weather broadcasters is an official degree in Meteorology, so I hesitantly turned on the weather channel and hoped for the best. Instead, I heard the worst. "We are tracking a snowstorm of mammoth proportion bearing down on the East Coast", "20 or more inches expected in Washington, DC", "Boston should be under the full effects of the storm early Sunday afternoon", which was the exact time we were expected to fly home. And just like that, my vacation weekend became a 3-day vigil of watching, worrying and whining.
But I wasn’t always this stressed about the weather. In fact, I use to be quite the opposite.
As a kid, I would pray for snow and lots of it. I wouldn’t be happy unless it was a full blown Northeaster with so much wind driven snow that I’d have to jump out the 2nd floor window onto the back porch to shovel the back door open from the outside in. My mother would bundle me up in so many layers my limbs wouldn’t bend. I’d waddle out to build my snow fort, which I would load up with dozens of snowballs in preparation for attack. If it were a weekend storm, my father would toss us into the car with our old-fashioned toboggan and head to Gallows Hill Park for survival sledding. No plastic saucers for us. Our sleds had steel blades so sharp, you risked being impaled if you rolled off and into the path of oncoming traffic. If you couldn’t afford a sled, you would use a piece of cardboard, which worked well once you mastered the trick of hanging onto the slippery sides with your mittens. Otherwise, you’d slide off and come to a dead stop mid hill, unable to get out of the way due to excessive bundling, watching horrified as the screaming faces of kids laying stomach down on their bruising bobsleds bared down upon you. I’d stumble home from my winter play day, one mitten on, one mitten lost, crooked hat caked with frozen snow and face flushed from freezing fun.
But somewhere over the years, I stopped seeing the magic in the weather, and started to see anything but a nice day as a major inconvenience.
Instead of sleepless nights spent thinking about snowman building, my dreams are disturbed by the distinct crunch of the city snowplow barricading my driveway. Could I possibly be the same person who would crouch outside my mother’s bedroom door, straining to hear Al Needham read the school cancellations on the Salem station, and bursting into happy hysteria when I heard the magic words "All schools, every school, in SALEM"?
Back then, every season, every storm was a new playground. When I was 7, a giant summer downpour inspired me to run up to my room, put my bathing suit on, grab the shampoo and a bar of soap and run outside to see if I could take a shower in the rain. As the door closed behind me, it slammed on the words of my father’s warning "run out that door now and it’s the last shower you’ll take this week" (word to the wise- even the heaviest rain does NOT wash soap out of your hair and eyes, so think twice before doing this). Now, instead of running outside in an excited frenzy, I run down the basement to see if it has flooded.
The same fall leaves that were a landing pad for a long jump, are now a long day of manual labor, and the summer heat wave synonymous with a beach play week now turns me into a sweltering ball of uselessness, drained of energy and crouching in front of the air conditioning for relief.
But before I admonish myself for having a bad attitude, I need to remember where I live. This is New England, after all, and talking about weather is the mainstay of our conversation. Its tradition for us to complain- its who we are, its what we do. And being the good student that I am, it seems I’ve earned my Master’s Degree at the New England College of Complaining.
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