March Snow

It seems that everyone is so convinced that Spring has arrived. It seems that there has been a story on every local television station about an early Spring. I'm not convinced.

Granted, I grew up in Meadows of Dan, where we would have snow when places "below the mountain" only had rain. For the majority of my life, I didn't even start thinking about Spring until the end of March. Some of the biggest snow storms that I can remember happened in March. Being a March baby, I remember how I would wish for a warm day for my birthday so that I could have an outdoor party like so many of my friends. I do remember one year, my birthday arrived and it was a warm, spring-like day. YAY! I remember mom out in the yard setting up food on the picnic table and daddy setting up the croquet wickets. Unfortunately, I also remember that everyone was playing croquet and I reached down to pick up my croquet ball, just as Tony Sutphin hauled off to hit it with his mallet. Yep. My finger was caught between the hard ball and the mallet. Needless to say, I lost that fingernail!

I have other memories of snow storms in March.

A car accident took my mom's life during a snow storm on March 2, 1980 as she was trying to get to work "below the mountain" in Stuart. When you lived in Meadows of Dan, you usually didn't let snow stop you from going where you needed or you would have been sitting at home for a good deal of the winter.

Another that comes to mind was in the mid 1990s when I was stranded in a cabin in Lyndhurst, Virginia for almost a week! A girl friend from Northern Virginia met me there for what was supposed to just be a couple of nights to help me celebrate my birthday. We had went to Kroger to pick up a few groceries since we planned on eating at the cabin. After four days, the loaf of bread, dozen eggs and some ham were long gone. We were HUNGRY! Oh, yeah, did I mention that the electricity went out which means that the electric heat did not work?  Nor did the plumbing work, so then we could not flush the toilet nor did we have any water. There was a wood stove, but we had only picked up a tiny bundle of wood just to have a nice fire one night. Finally, late on day 4, the owners of the cabin showed up on a snow mobile and brought us some Dinty Moore stew, a bundle of firewood and a couple gallons of water. That was the best stew I think that I have ever tasted! Our cars were completely buried by the drifting snow. The road was finally plowed on Day 5 and we were able to leave on Day 6. Of course, there was no phone in the cabin and this was long before most folks had cell phones, so our families had no idea where we were.

Then, in 1995, I remember having a big amount of snow in March, like 18 inches followed just a few days later by another foot or so of snow. It seemed that it would never stop snowing!

I think that the snow to end all snow storms happened in 1960. Of course, that was before I was born, but I always heard tales of how terrible it was. The snow drifted so high on the shoulders of the road that it was feared that when they plowed through, the walls of snow would collapse back into the road. All the snow storms of my childhood were always held up and compared to the great snow of 1960!

Tonight finds me sitting on the couch, watching the local weather forecasts on television. It is supposed to snow tonight. I have heard guesses of everything from a dusting to 4" from the Alberta clipper system that is coming through tonight.  In the past, I have seen March Alberta clippers dump way more than was forecasted. I guess we will know when we wake up in the morning!