Alabama Snow

I’m late. Blogs all over Birm­ing­ham are filled with pic­tures of yesterday’s snow. Not to dis­ap­point, I will post the most suc­cess­ful of the 200+ pic­tures we took on our adven­tures yes­ter­day. (Not includ­ing those with rosy-cheeked faces in them.)

When it snows in Birm­ing­ham, there is a run on bread and milk. Most every­one in the city must be din­ing on soggy milk sand­wiches. Actu­ally, the same holds true for tor­na­does, and since we had some of both in the last week, the gro­cers must be happy. We hole up in our homes, know­ing that dri­ving in a quar­ter inch of snow means mad­ness.  Chil­dren beg to go out­side, and if there are no gloves to be had in the house, Mom finds a pair of thick socks or gar­den gloves. Snow­men aren’t made in any con­ven­tional way, because there’s so lit­tle raw mate­r­ial. Mud can indeed be used to make a fair base, as every Alabama child knows years before they actu­ally read To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. (If you didn’t get that ref­er­ence, go to a library! Now!) Pines­traw and leaves can also be used as filler.

One of my favorite child­hood mem­o­ries is when my father returned home from a job in Ten­nessee, dri­ving all night with a bed of snow in the back of the red truck so that we could play in it.  We didn’t leave the truck bed until the last bit of it had melted away.  I’m not sure if it’s hyper­bole or not, but his ver­sion of the story involves stop­ping and hav­ing a cou­ple of bystanders ask if that was really snow, and where did he get it from?  His reply, “Up north,” was answered with slam­ming truck doors as the young fel­lows went peel­ing off, going to get them­selves some of that icy good­ness for their own uses.

These pic­tures were all taken in the space of about two hours.  After snow­ball fights made our skin sting,  a walk through the Botan­i­cal Gar­dens was in order.   My hus­band took this last pic­ture on one of the rare moments I relin­quished the cam­era.  I wanted to store up every image of beauty as my own, forever!

Nat­u­rally, it’s all very amus­ing to our north­ern neigh­bors, who seem to find snow to be a chore more than any­thing else.  Deal­ing with our inabil­ity to drive in the white beauty is the real nui­sance… Every year I hear some Yan­kee trans­plant pro­claim, “This is noth­ing!  It’s not even real snow!”

That’s just fine.  South­ern­ers may be a lit­tle excitable, over­re­act­ing to what oth­ers see as just another form of pre­cip­i­ta­tion, but the beauty is not lost on us.  Even if we move to a place where snow becomes com­mon­place, we’ll gen­er­ally con­tinue to appre­ci­ate the snow.  One inch of magic white crys­tals cov­er­ing the world can com­pletely trans­form every­thing.  Spring is def­i­nitely almost here, but I’m over­joyed that we actu­ally got a few unex­pected hours of win­ter magic this year.