Preparing for Winter in the South

I just had to take a minute and write about this because this amuses me to no end. We live in South Carolina and have for four years now. Whenever there is mention of snow coming our way people literally freak out. I'm not exaggerating at all when I use the term "freak out" either.

In our four years here I have seen the town of Clemson literally shut down due to an inch or so of snow. I've also seen the schools let out at noon when there was mention of snow. The funny thing about this is that it never did snow. School has been cancelled when they thought it might be icy out because the weather had gotten cold the night before. Now, I realize that we are in the south and they don't have the equipment needed when things like this happen. However, the panic that people go into has been chuckling just a bit.

I should probably tell you that I grew up in Indiana. Snow is a part of our lives up there. I can remember winters where we had to walk just to get anywhere, but we didn't panic about it. Schools sometimes got cancelled, but our high school was in the middle of nowhere and I'm serious when I say that. My parents lived in the middle of a cornfield and when we got snow and the wind picked up you didn't really want to be out in it. The roads would drift shut and you really couldn't get out in it even if you wanted to.

We are supposed to start getting snow at midnight tonight and it's supposed to snow all day tomorrow. Yesterday I had a nail in my tire. I went down the road to WalMart to see if they could fix it for me. I was told no, but also was told that they had a three hour wait because people wanted to get their tires done before the big snow. I just chuckled when I heard this. So I packed up my kids and we headed to Greenville to go to Sears. When I walked into the Tire Department I almost died. There were people standing around all over the place. When it was finally my turn to go up to the counter I asked the man if it was always this busy. Guess what his reply was. He said "No, but it's a Saturday and people are also preparing for the bad weather we've got coming." Enough said!

So here I sit, writing this article and thinking about what I'm going to do with my kids for the next two days since more than likely they'll not have school on Monday or Tuesday. I need to go to the store to get stuff for lunches, but I'm not rushing off or worried about getting my bread, milk and eggs. I wonder though when I do make it to the store how much of that stuff will be gone!