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WARNING: TOXIC SNOW

Southerners are funny about cold temperatures and snow. First off, you need to realize that in southern Louisiana, it can still be 70 degrees in November. December might be a little cooler, like 50 to 60, with some nights plummeting down to (gasp) 40 degrees or possibly plunging to (another gasp) Not zero, mind you. Just freezing. 32 degrees. When one of these rare, cold nights threaten the area, with even the merest glimmer of a possible possibility there might be ice or snowin the morning, the entire town goes on high alert. People frantically run to the grocery stores and jam the aisles of the Walmart, to make sure they have food in the house, especially bread n’ milk, and firewood for the fireplaces.

On all the local news channels, the weather people look terribly serious and warn that school could be delayed or even canceled, and if you don’t to go out in the Killer Cold, for heaven’s sake, do the sensible thing and stay indoors. You do want to take chances with weather like this, they say in solemn tones.

There are dire little ticker-tape thingies running all day on the bottom of the television screen, urging you to CHECK ON YOUR ELDERLY NEIGHBORS…BRING ANIMALS INDOORS IF POSSIBLE…USE EXTRA CAUTION WHEN DRIVING…

As though a winter storm of historic, unimaginably vicious intensity was about to sweep down and entomb the entire town in ice.

The first time I witnessed the public panic over some possible cold temperatures, my response was something like… You see, we had lived in the Great Snowy Upper Midwest, where the wind chill plunged to 40 or 50 below zero, and caused the trees to crack open. For the 15 years before that, we had lived in the Great Snowy Northeast, where one year it snowed clear into the first week in June. I had called my mother on the phone to cry about it, since I’d planted flowers like a dummy, thinking that the snow was over for the year. It wasn’t.

Check on your neighbors, don’t go outside, what nonsense was this? The cold came and went and left one gazillionth of a millimeter layer of fragile, delicate ice coating on the ever-present wet spots on the sidewalks and streets. You could have coughed on it and it would have melted, if that paints a better picture.

Perhaps a dozen toxic snowflakes had been sighted by the ever vigilant news crews.

School was delayed for an hour until the dangerous ice melted. I drove my boys to school and watched them mingle with the other kids on the sidewalk, who were all shivering and shaking, bundled in layers of jackets, coats, hats, mittens, scarves, the whole schmeer. My guys wore only the school uniform, which consisted of long pants and a short sleeved polo shirt.

Mothers anxiously escorted the smaller children to safety in case they were Overcome With Cold, or had to possibly walk by some ice that hadn’t fully melted. My boys got a lot of stares, as did I, clad only in a short sleeved t-shirt and jeans. The temperature gauge on my car read 52. I ignored the stares and drove home. About 30 minutes later, I received a phone call from a very nice, but very concerned elementary school principal.

“Surely,” she said, “you realize the necessity of dressing young children appropriately for the winters here?” She had received several calls from mothers who had witnessed my boys entering the school… on morning, of mornings, during this dreadful cold spell, I agreed they had no coats on, which she could not quite understand. “It’s winter,” she kept repeating, “It’s winter out there.”

“For it’s winter,” I kept answering. “For us transplanted Northerners, this is a summer night. My kids don’t even put a sweatshirt on until it’s about 30 degrees. In their last school, the teachers didn’t even let the kids inside to play during recess until the temperatures dropped below zero. Not 32… zero.”

school,” she insisted, “No teacher or principal would be so cruel to a child.”

“Oh, we’re very used to the cold,” I re-assured the poor woman, but I took pity on her and made the boys wear sweaters to school in the mornings until the Louisiana winter ended in February.