In addition to the general message on this web site about my plans to be safe and warm, if not connected, I had also made more specific plans for mutual aid and comfort in the event of a Big Snow and Power Outage. If snow actually fell, and the private road became undrivable, I'd walk to one of the few stores that still have phones and call one of the few people I know who are still required to carry phones on the job.
Snow did not fall at the Cat Sanctuary. A little rain fell, early in the morning. Mostly it was just a cloudy, chilly, damp day. Nevertheless, one of the few people whose vehicles can roll up the private road rolled up to take me into town for the night anyway. The ground didn't even freeze overnight.
"North Carolina is the big winner of this snowstorm," the weatherman was saying this morning. By "big winner" he meant the place that really had what Southerners consider Big Snow--as much as seven inches, somewhere. Bristol got the kind of sprinkling Gate City got a few weeks ago. Gate City didn't even get a freezing cold night, though some schools and businesses were announcing "snow schedules" just in case somebody's commute might have involved black ice.
North Carolina was also the "big winner" of hurricane damage last fall so it's unlikely that the people waking up to Big Snow felt like winners. More like "We just replaced that shed last month, and there's that tree...!" They can still use "disaster tourists."
The snowstorm was not apparently a factor in the loss of five students from Tusculum University in Tennessee. All five were hospitalized after a car crash. One has died.
The television showed the faces of their classmates in a memorial assembly where teachers were blathering about the dead boy.
I remembered another event that took place before my time, but that was burned into my memory by many tellings of the story. Fifteen or twenty teenagers, a church youth group, walking along a back road, on the left side, when a drunk driver rolled into the middle of the crowd. Five teenagers taken to hospital. The one of them who was my grandparents' oldest son died from his injuries. Slowly. While the two younger brothers he'd always led and protected, my father and the uncle I knew, watched. Afterward my grandparents, some of their brothers and sisters, and my father vowed that they would never own or drive cars. It wasn't poverty, though the grandparents' generation had far too many children to be prosperous until those children grew up and went to work, and the uncle I never knew had been the oldest of those children. It wasn't defiance of trends, though they did defy any trends they hadn't set, themselves. They hated cars. It was as if they felt, and they probably did feel, that the drunk driver's car was like a living thing that had intentionally attacked those teenagers. The grandparents used to take out their eldest son's school pictures and reminisce about what a fine lad he'd been, and cry, real tears, every day; they thought it showed depth of feeling not to let themselves move past that stage of grief, so they never did.
We don't need to let the globalist greedheads tell us to drive less and form "walkable communities" again, Gentle Readers. Their ideas about how to accomplish those goals are all wrong anyway. But we do need to drive less and make our neighborhoods more walkable. We need more foot traffic, fighting crime and preserving our health at the same time, and fewer motor vehicles, endangering lives and polluting the air.
The clock ticked over from five a.m. to six. The six o'clock news began as usual with replays of the same video used on the five o'clock news. "North Carolina is the big winner..."
"If I had a snowball I'd like to throw it at him," growled my host. "Wouldn't you?"
Why not? I still think throwing snow, and falling down in snow, and eating snow that nobody has thrown or fallen down on, are fun.
If I had a field of lilies, I'd send them to the bereaved at Tusculum.
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