The National Weather forecast for the American Southeast for January 10, 2025, predicts a winter storm. There is not anything more devastating and initiating panic for people in Alabama to hear than WINTER STORM WARNING. Alabamians just do stupid stuff and create shortages, chaos, and waste.
Having lived in Illinois on the Wisconsin state line, I experienced snow, lots of it. When I started kindergarten in 1958, I experienced a snowstorm for the first time. I opened the car door to have violent winds blowing snow. Daddy had gotten me a bag of cheese curls for a snack and the wind ripped the bag from my hands and scattered those delicious cheese curls in the snow. The yellow against the white was etched in my mind. It was beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. My bag was gone with the north wind and my little heart broken. I started to cry. Daddy said it would be okay and handed me another bag that he had bought for him. I figured that the Abdominal Snowman had a yellow treats in the snow that was very deep for a small boy.
When I started the first grade, momma received a list of things that were required for men to attend South Beloit Elementary. Momma had never been out of Alabama. The list was foreign to her. I had to have a snowsuit and snow galoshes. Believe it or not I walked to school in the snow. First time I wore my new galoshes someone stole them and replaced mine with an old worn pair. Momma was not happy with those Yankees. Snow was part of living up North.
Back in Alabama, snow, which is more ice than flakes paralyze. Stores run out of milk, bread, and cold cuts. It was 1985 when a winter storm paralyzed central Alabama. It was a Wednesday night, and I was returning home from conducting a Prayer Meeting for a pastor friend who was out of town. The rain fell and temperature dropped as rain turned to sleet and ice. I can close my eyes and visualize the windshield wipers as they moved pushing the frozen Slushy.
Nothing really accumulated and we went to bed. Around three in the morning there was an eerie silence. The electricity was off. I heard from time sounds as a shotgun shooting in the woods. I looked out the bedroom window and it bright white. Going to the back deck of the house I stepped into snow, about a foot deep. The sound was limbs from a pine ticket breaking under the weight of the snow. As daylight came, my neighbors and I discovered that electric power lines were down everywhere. It was not good for all of us with total electric homes, but I did have and use a fireplace to help heat the house.
From Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon, we had no power. We mattresses and cover to the great room where the fireplace was. I used it to cook meals. My son Andy and daughter Angel loved it. They said it was like camping. I moved all the refrigerated food to the snowbank on the back deck. County water continued and I heated water in five-gallon buckets by the fireplace. By Sunday power was back.
That Friday night I decide I would take a bath. My wife asked how I would do that. I told her like I had for most of my life. We did not have and inside bathroom until the spring of my senior year of high school. My family washed in a foot tube with water heated by the potbellied stove. She laughed until I appeared clean, shaved, and hair washed. Saturday night she asked if I could heat her some water.
The next year, 1986, we had another winter storm. It was almost the same scenario but worse. Fearing another winter storm people went crazy. We had an extra frig in the basement. Living in the country you buy enough food stuff to last a week or longer. I asked if we needed anything, and my wife said a gallon of milk.
One again it was a Wednesday night, and I went to the local Wally World (Wal-Mart) to buy a gallon of milk. I went the store, and I encounter pandemonium. People panicked. There were people pushing a buggy of milk and pulling another full of break. I stopped amazed and puzzled. The store was out of milk. Pushing and shoving everywhere. Frighten people ran and screamed. I thought just what it will look like if the world was ending.
Suddenly a man yelled, “Winn-Dixie has a truck load of milk!” I imagined it looked as did the Hebrews when they left Egypt. I went to the car and drove to Winn-Dixie where a tractor-trailer loaded with milk was unloading. It was the same as Wal-Mart. I got a gallon of milk, out my index finger in the handle, threw it across my shoulder, and proceeded to the checkout line.
I man pushing a full buggy of milk and pulling a buggy of bread stopped me and asked, “That all the milk you gonna get?”
I replied, “Yep, all I need.”
He reminded that there was a winter storm coming. I told him that this is Alabama and how long does snow stay on the ground especially since the ground is not frozen, three maybe four days.
It did last for four days. A neighbor went to check on folks in our country community. He found a family that had made fun of our country/backward way of life. The Birmingham transplants did not have any electricity due to down lines, no water because the pumping stations had no power, and no heat trying to burn green logs in a fireplace.
My neighbor invited the family to his house where his wife had a hot breakfast with biscuits, hot coffee, and a warm house. After thawing out and returning home, my neighbor gave them some dry wood, showed them how to start a fire with kindling. From then on the Birmingham transplants had a different attitude toward county folks.
Nowadays I question what has happened to common sense? I like what a fellow Alabamian said, “A country boy can survive.”
"As long as the earth endures, seedtime
and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never
cease." Matthew 24:22
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