The weather outside is frightful

With news and Twitter reports of snow coming to the mid and eastern parts of North America, I'm reminded of when my family moved (temporarily) from Canada to St. Louis Mo. (okay, really a suburb of St. Louis).

St. Louis is a Midwestern city in the United States. As such, it gets a "different" amount of snow than we were used to. Sure enough, the first few months we were there it snowed. Nothing major in our books. About 6 inches, if memory serves.

Well, if our neighbours hadn't thought this was some sort of natural disaster! At the time, St. Louis (or at least he municipality we were in) didn't have snow ploughs. Well, as you can imagine, if there's no way to get rid of 6 inches of snow (and no one really gets winter tires) everyone was at a standstill. As I recall, we still had snow tires on our Cutlass Sierra; so, we proceeded to drive around to do whatever we needed to do. Going to the grocery store was a bit of a waste of time because the shelves were bare. With news of several inches of snow, everyone bought whatever they could get.

We took it in stride and strapped on our cross-country skies and skied around the neighbourhood. I found out later that people were looking at us out their windows wondering why these crazy people were outside risking their lives!

Of course, schools were closed and businesses were shut down until the snow could be removed. I think it was a full two weeks before they procured some ploughs to stick on the front of garbage trucks to motor around the roads getting snow off them. We had to spend an extra 20 minutes a day in class to make up for the lost time at school.

Returning to Canada (Ottawa), I can only remember once when schools were closed due to the cold weather. And it was due to the temperature being –40 C. I can't begin to count how many times we've received over a foot of snow, simply shovelled/ploughed it out of the way and gone on with life.

Anyway, good luck to those areas of North America that can't handle a significant amount of snow. Believe me, it's survivable.