When I was in grade school, the school I attended was literally three blocks away. I remember it so well. My first real crush happened there. I was in kindergarten... I'm getting off track here.
When there was a snow storm school would be cancelled, just like at every other school in the northern part of the country. One year, when I reached the old age of six, we had a storm that caused the school to cancel classes for three days. Now being a child with exceptional memories, I couldn't tell you how many inches we received in that storm or in what date it occurred because my focus lay elsewhere, like sledding, building snowmen, and sledding. I also remember hot cocoa... But to not have classes for three days was like having Christmas vacation all over again. Did I mention sledding?
I lived in the city in an apartment building. Sledding opportunities were very slim. Unless you had a large dog to pull you around, you mainly carried a sled under your arm, that's it. On the morning of day two into the storm my friend, who lived next door, came over with an orange plastic sled under his arm and asked if I wanted to go, you guessed it, sledding. I was excited. I grabbed mine and followed him to where ever he was going to find a hill. Instead we went to his house.
I was very confused, not to mention having to climb over some pretty large snow banks to get there, none of which were large enough to slide down, I just didn't understand. We met up with his older brother who asked if we were ready. We went to his father's garage and took out a ladder. We walked around the garage and the older brother leaned the ladder on the roof. He said to wait a minute then showed back up with his sled.
When the older brother climbed up the roof and slid off the other side I was scared to death to think that they thought this was a safe sledding opportunity. I went around to see if he lived through the encounter and was amazed to see that the snow was so high it overlapped the roof line. You guess what happened after that, we had so much fun sledding that whole day my mom had to come and get me at supper.
A whole other story of her shock at me doing this terrible unsafe activity and what I had to do so I could sled on the third snow day followed. But that's a memory for another day. The point here is that I remember some pretty large snow events in the past.
To hear Brian Williams talk about the two, maybe three feet that was surly coming made me consider many storms in my past. I often expected at least one storm a year to be as bad as when I was six where we had three days off. Most really bad storms allowed us two days off but I think it was due more to the fact that there just wasn't enough modern snow removal equipment around like we see today.
I know global warming is playing a large part in our large storm configuration of late. But I think there are many large storms in the past that were considered normal for winter in New England. Will this storm be considered "Historic"? Maybe for Boston or New York, but for Maine, I think this will be just another great sledding opportunity.
