A little after seven this Tuesday morning, and your lazy correspondent is sprawled on the couch in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, watching it snow.
We Southerners are fascinated by snow, a genuine novelty to us. The last snow to dust Panama City came in 1989, two years before I arrived there. In 2014 we were subjected to a morning of frozen mix, and the neighborhood kids were out in their yards building sleetmen. You use what you have, I guess.
My father grew up in north Mississippi, and in his 40s lived in Naperville, Illinois. Dad loved snow as well, and would merrily don his moon suit and crank up the snow blower whenever a good accumulation would bury his drive and walkway. His neighbors thought the whole spectacle a bit eccentric. When I got back from the war in 1991, I went to Chicago for a visit and Dad bought us as a special treat tickets to opening day at Wrigley Field. We ended up watching the game in front of the fireplace at his house because it was, you guessed it, snowing in April in the Windy City, with mixed precip blowing sideways into the outfield off of the lake. Our blood was too thin for that.
I have yet to meet someone up here who has anything nice to say about snow. Or, more accurately, I've yet to meet a Northerner (trying to excise "Yankee" from my vocabulary, in the name of regional comity) who moved south and did not explain the decision as a means of escaping the burdens of shoveling snow. And they seem to hate March and April snow a lot more than this lovely fall dusting I'm watching out my window right now. Sometime around the first of the year, apparently the novelty wears off and the parade of gray, snowy days taxes their morale. Next thing they know, they're living out the last couple decades of their life in a double-wide nestled between swamp and beach and a thousand other double-wides somewhere near Tampa, swatting mosquitoes and justifying the whole milieu to themselves because at least they're not shoveling snow.
Outside, it's sticking to the rooftops but not the yards at this point, and coming down a lot heavier than when I started typing this.
I seem to have wandered off topic. According to an article from the UK this morning, that is typical for those of us who've spent the pandemic mostly isolated. Our brains get prematurely old, our hippocampus shrinks from lack of outdoor activity, we forget what we did yesterday, we have trouble keeping our thoughts organized. And drinking makes it worse, which is worrisome in a household where the pre-prandial happy hour is our traditional celebration of ending a productive day.
But then the thought of a cocktail reminds me of what I planned to discuss: the odd juxtapose between a climate that is frozen for much of the year and New Yorkers' manifest love of ice cream. Don't ask how ice cream and cocktails relate; it just reflects a short-circuit in my cerebral wire bundle.
Drive around the hills anywhere in New York State, and one encounters at every little town and crossroads a mom-and-pop ice cream stand, offering homemade frozen delights and outdoor picnic tables so you can sit there shivering with your rum raisin on a waffle cone.
P and I have yet to stop for a snack because their wine list is entirely nonexistent, and Peg's disdain for ice cream is matched only by her dislike for another staple of northern culture, the drop ceiling one sees in every basement here.
I'm told there is some reason for this aesthetic abomination that relates to the calculation of property taxes, but I can't imagine there's a tax break that would cause P not to tear down the tiles and install a real ceiling if it were her house.
There I go digressing again. Ice cream and drop ceilings. What the hell? I need to get out more.
Snow's coming down a lot harder now, but still not sticking to the lawns. I reckon it's a little too warm for that. Big, fat flakes now, which I think means it's wet stuff and just barely cold enough to be snowing at all.
At some point there is the inevitable temptation to go all Toynbee and try to make some sweeping generalization about what things like an affinity for ice cream stands over honky tonks, or the prevalence of drop ceilings or ugly wall-to-wall carpet or half a hundred other cultural markers of this place, say about the people who live here. It is a way for an outsider to feel profound, and try to find some meaning in this sojourn in a very foreign place. But there is a superficial, ersatz quality to that sort of punditry. We gloss over details, or see what we want to see.
My ancestors supposedly left their farms and mustered against the invasion of 1861 with the mantra that one Southerner could whip a dozen Yankees. At least that's what we all heard in Gone with the Wind. Yankees were soft and urbane, they thought too hard, they didn't know how to shoot a gun, they lacked the rugged frontier spirit of the South. Having driven around here for the last six weeks, it's obvious to me those assumptions reflected a colossal display of ignorance--anyone who could survive as a farmer in these remote glens (or "hollers" as they'd be called in P's native country), keeping livestock alive in snow up to their chins for half the year, had to be tough as hell. Their cousins in the Boston brownstones might have been sissies, but that's the peril of generalizing.
So we'll leave it with the observation that New Yorkers love their ice cream, even as we puzzle that the object of their affection in this frozen place is itself frozen. I will note that love of ice cream matches the character of the locals we've met in that they're all so damned even-keeled and nice--it's hard to picture someone shooting up the courthouse square while waving a pistachio ice cream cone in one's free hand.
So maybe we'll overcome Peg's ice cream aversion and partake of this local custom--when the snow melts in six months.
Serah.
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