Flaky White Stuff

White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes (mp3)
Life is White - Big Star (mp3)

Sunday, my family spent more than $200 on clothing items, another $50 at Ace Hardware, and another $100 in groceries in spite of the fact that we’d been grocery shopping less than a week prior. My boss called me three different times. This is not usual on a Sunday.

Yesterday, My aunt and uncle rearranged their vacation and chose to remain with us longer than originally planned. Our friend who had to attend a relative’s funeral in Arizona is still out in Arizona. Almost a dozen people sent me pictures on my cell phone before noon, when most weeks I’m lucky to get two or three pics, and usually from just one or two specific people. Pics from school. Pics from Wal-Mart. Pics from driveways and living rooms.

My very selective Facebook friends (ha) posted at least a few hundred pictures yesterday. My friends don’t generally post many pictures.

Most unusually, I met four of my neighbors for the first time. We spent several hours sharing space with more than a dozen other children, teenagers and adults we hardly knew and hardly ever see.

All because it snowed.

Granted, Chattanooga didn’t just get a flurry. Most of the Southeast was slammed with a winter storm that woke us up Monday morning to more snow than we’ve seen in almost 20 years, since the freakish storm of March 1993. Perhaps the most astonishing part about this snow is how dead-on accurate the weather forecasts were. They’ve been spot-on all year regarding snow, actually.

Maybe you’re a person who has faith in weather forecasts. If you’re a person like that, you’re most definitely not from Chattanooga, because our particular geographical issues make us a damn tough place to predict weather. We know better. Weather forecasting might as well involve chicken blood or rolling dice.

Milk and bread jokes aside, what happened in our little neighborhood today, and what happened in neighborhoods all over the South, was something that just doesn’t happen much in our modern society. People actually hung out at length with their neighbors, and they did so outside and without the need for some party or BBQ or pre-determined Event. We shared sleds. We offered each other hot chocolate or other fun winter amenities. We took pictures of other families with their cameras and told stories while our children disappeared from view at moderate speeds.

One of my neighbors spent almost an hour shoveling the driveway of an elderly neighbor before ever even thinking of doing so for his own driveway. (In fact, I don’t know if he shoveled his own driveway at all today.) Two of us helped push the newspaper delivery dude down the road. Clearly the guy needed the money, because no other explanation fit his risking it with the piece of trash he drove.

Some rowdy teenage boys with awesome blade sleds, the kind of boys who tend to soar down a hill with reckless abandon and fail to think about small children or dogs who might get in their way, were nothing but polite and considerate. They offered their sleds to my daughters and several times shouted down as I was walking up to make sure the path was clear for them to be reckless and stupid.

It was the kind of neighborhood day people romanticize about, where everyone gets along, and no one talks about politics or broaches icky subjects like the NRA or traffic cameras. Everyone smiles at one another, because snow days are bigger than us in our little Dixieland and certainly bigger than our even littler neighborhood, and everyone around us has enough bread and milk and food, and we can all just smile and savor this rare occurrence together.

So we had that going for us. Which was nice.