Last week my husband and I lunched outside and basked in 70° weather. Today?
I think not!
Yesterday, I awoke to find three inches of snow on the ground. Now I admit that three inches is nothing compared to what my friend Nancy Pickard’s been having out in Kansas, but we seldom see half this much in a year. I realized that people were believing the more optimistic accumulation predictions when my son reported that his nearest grocery store was out of bread and milk by 5:30 Friday afternoon.
See, that’s what Southerners do. As soon as snow’s predicted, we rush to the store and stock up on bread and milk because we have enough sense to know it might be two or three days before we can see the road again.
Some folks from “further up the road” (as one of my neighbors refers to our northern émigrés) will complain that Southerners don’t know how to drive in snow and ice. They’re right. We don’t. That’s because most of us don’t even try. I’m fully convinced that the ones that are out there skidding into each other are all Yankees who don’t know that you’re supposed to stay home when it snows.
So with no reason to go out, you’d think that the writers among us would be hunched over a warm computer screen, busily working on the next manuscript. Right?
Wrong.
In an informal survey of my writer friends in the area, I learned that one was cleaning her attic, one was down in the basement sorting through boxes, while another was alphabetizing her spice cabinet. I myself spent the day culling my closets. I filled two large shopping bags for a local thrift shop with clothes I haven’t worn in years, but were too good to throw away.
If you have as much trouble as I used to have deciding what to keep and what to toss, here’s a trick I learned that really works for me. If the item is something you think you might wear again and can’t bear to give away this time, put it back in the closet with the coat hanger turned the wrong way. If that coat hanger’s still turned around the next time you get around to cleaning out the closet, then you know you haven’t worn it in at least a year. Knowledge is power. Into the bag it goes.
So what do you do on your snow days?
