Late Saturday morning I was out walking my dog, Summer, when I saw a neighbor headed down her driveway all bundled up against the cold and carrying a small hammer.
I wasn’t sure what needed busting up, but I could tell she meant business. So I stopped to find out.
“Do you want to see how I get the red flag up?” she asked.
Of course.
Jane intended to make sure the mail carrier stopped at her house that afternoon, so she brought the proper tool for the task — a hammer to crack the coat of ice that had sealed the flag to the side of the mailbox. A few good whacks did the trick.
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There isn’t anything I don’t love about the way winter weather puts the brakes on our everyday routines and makes people adjust to obstacles. One day it’s a woman banging a hammer on her mailbox. The next it might be a banker in duck boots digging a customer’s car out of a snowbank. (That happened to me once. I was not the banker.)
As I write about my nostalgia for winter weather, we have just dodged what a friend calls an Ice-mageddon but we are possibly headed for the kind of snowstorm that Kentuckians aren’t known for handling very well. The glorious kind, in my view.
The National Weather Service sounded the alarm over the weekend and warned we could have 6 to 12 inches of snow by Tuesday, followed by another storm Wednesday and Thursday with more accumulation.
The lead-up to such an event is awe-inspiring. My husband heard someone in a check-out line Saturday morning saying we would be getting 12 to 18 inches of snow. He came home and told me, “This snowstorm just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
I’m grateful that last week we didn’t get the kind of ice that tears down trees and power lines. We know how awful that can be. But I would be just as grateful for a foot of snow, the kind that makes bankers take up snow shovels and has strangers helping strangers out of snowbanks. (Plus, my golden retriever would love a good romp through the snow.)
This column first ran in Hoptown Chronicle’s Sunday Brew newsletter on Feb. 15.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
