Guest Blog by Chris Gregoire
“When I was a child, I had to walk to school through a blizzard, for three miles. There were no snow days. We didn’t have fancy global warming; it snowed every day. Uphill both ways. Barefoot.”
How many times have you heard stories like this? I remember every single snow day when I was a child, hearing some variation of this story, when I was dropped off at my grandfather’s house. Maybe without the “Global Warming” part; in the 80’s, it wasn’t really as big an issue. There was always an element of fantasy in these stories though, and a morsel of truth. I can just imagine the stories I’ll tell, when my 11 month old daughter reaches school age:
“Back when I was a child, we had to wait until there was snow on the ground before the schools would close. There’s no way a school would say they were closed the night before a storm. We didn’t have that much trust in weathermen. And if there was only an inch or two, school was still open. We used to have these things called ‘Delays’ which meant that the town would plow, and we would go into school a little late.”
I wonder if my daughter will look at me with the same, “Are you serious?” look I am sure I gave my grandfather.
Turn on the news every time a snowstorm hits a southern state, and watch the New England news stations poke fun at the inhabitants down there. And yet there was nothing on the news this morning other than the fact we were getting pummeled with a three inch snowstorm. At 6:30 this morning, Fox news had the totals up, and there were none higher than 2 inches. But it was all they would talk about last night on the 6, 10, and 11 o’clock news.
What happened to the “Tough New Englander”? Is that image no longer fitting? What do you think?