Sarah E. Moffett

“Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.” I couldn’t agree more with Bill Watterson, except to add that getting this D.C. slushy nastiness is more like having to pay back the lottery. After you’ve spent it.

Rumor has it that in some countries, snow is so rare, that it is worshiped. Here in the good metropolis of Washington, D.C., it falls into an entirely different category. The category just beneath Extra Terrestrial Invasion. Read: the freak out is ridiculous. I nearly lost two toes in Safeway to a runaway grandma who thought I wanted the last gallon of milk. Do I look like I drink milk? And I-95, there are not words. Literally. Words to explain that parking lot at 1:00 p.m. are not in the English language. And yet, I bet there were some good ol’ words in Webster for the driver that jack knifed his U.S. Mail tractor trailer across most of the southbound lanes.

Thoreau was credited with saying “I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” Good for Henry David, but me thinks if he had to deal with DC’s twisted interpretation of snow, he might have stayed home with a good pipe and warm fire. And not just because of Zeus’s bad idea of a joke. Confession time.  I used to be among those that mocked everyone for rushing home at the possibility of snow. Then I realized they were smart. It’s not the snow that makes you need to get inside your own home. It’s the people.

*Here is more Calvin and Hobbes snow bliss. 

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