Keeping Perspective

In some emails to family and friends I portrayed the recent Atlanta snowstorm as a big deal, and in fact it was pretty unusual. They don't get snow here every year, our white Christmas last month was the first since 1882, and the total annual snowfall is only 2.5" on average. So when more than that was predicted for Sunday night into Monday morning, people went nuts. Grocery stores sold out of bread and milk. Hardware and home improvement stores ran low on salt, shovels, and sleds. Liquor sales were up, naturally.

All eleven [!] of the area's snow plows hit the roads, but of course they couldn't cover thousands of miles of streets, and the next afternoon the snow changed to freezing rain. Mind you, this isn't pool-table-flat Kansas or Indiana or Florida. This is Atlanta -- there are real hills here because there are actual mountains in the next county. So when you combine the topography with snow, ice, and a few million people who don't know how to drive in these conditions, it creates a very interesting scene indeed.

As I probably would have done had I been in their shoes, my friends up north used the occasion to make fun of us. We're weather wimps, they said. We need to stop com- plaining, they said. Look at Boston getting dumped on with a couple feet of snow today [Jan. 12]. Did you see what New York City went through three weeks ago? Buffalo and Syracuse get this all the time, and you don't hear them whining, they said. 

They're right, of course ... but, although I nobly suffered the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune -- not to mention my friends' disparaging remarks -- I also chose to reflect on the lessons one can learn from the situation.

 Keeping perspective is one of them. In the larger reality, this is no big deal. When I lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois -- on the shores of Lake Michigan and closer to Wisconsin than Chicago's Loop -- I didn't think much of driving to work in six or eight inches of snow with the temperature below zero. One week I lived there the high temperature the entire week was eight below! Yeah, it was pretty miserable, but you learn to deal with it. This week in Atlanta I just put on a sweater and "bundled in," as dey say in Nordakota.

The other lesson to take away from this little winter vignette is patience. In a few days nature will remove the snow and ice and we'll be back to normal, which in January is in the 40s for a daytime high.

So I'm being patient and reminding myself to keep perspective. After all, I could be in Fargo, dontcha' know.