Huckaby: Don't put away your coats just yet. There's a storm coming
Just when you thought it was safe to put the winter coats away, 22 degrees and an all-day wind that would blow the chrome off a trailer hitch happens. It is Georgia in March at its absolute finest.
For those who aren’t from around here, don’t be surprised if we get another cold snap just before Easter. That, and pollen, are the price we pay for living amidst the white and yellow blooms and beautiful sunsets that define the North Georgia Piedmont in Spring - which actually doesn’t start for another week or so.
In fact, I caught my lovely wife, Lisa, trying to take all my winter coats to the basement storage area six days ago. I told her not to. We had a big argument. Afterward Lisa did not take our winter clothing to the basement. I did. She made me.
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She also made me go down and recover them before we got up Saturday and found out that it was cold as a well-digger’s bottom. But that was nothing.
If you are reading this column on Sunday - the day of intended publication - it is March 13. And on March 13, in 1993, the storm of the century - that would be the previous century, I suppose - hit Atlanta and the North Georgia Piedmont. I bet y’all remember. It snowed nearly 3 feet in some parts of the state.
It was on a Saturday, you recall. Unlike many storms, it didn’t catch us by surprise. Prognosticators had been calling for snow just about all week. But it had been nearly 80 degrees on my birthday, March 10. So, yeah, we were thinking maybe a few flurries. I don’t think anybody was prepared for the amount of snow that would fall - or the wind or bone-chilling temperatures that would accompany the “blizzard.”
I know I wasn’t. My son Jackson was about to turn four, having been born on the Ides of March. We were celebrating the occasion by allowing him to have his very first spend-the-night party and had invited three of his friends to “camp out” in our living room. Four four-year-old boys for about 12 hours. We could handle that. Besides, we had Jackson’s seven-year-old sister, Jamie Leigh, who was born grown, to help. Then there was Jenna, who was less than a year-old, so she wasn’t any trouble - yet.
Piece of cake. I could handle it.
We entertained the kids with Disney movies and Uncle Remus stories and cooked hot dogs and made s’mores over the open fire in the living room - the fireplace had not been closed down for the season in 1993 - and I slept on the couch - where I will probably sleep for the next couple of days, once Lisa is made aware of this column - and kept one eye on the window, waiting for the snow that I wasn’t really confident would come.
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It came. Early in the morning, wind whipping around and howling like a banshee, the snow came - and came, and came and came.
You know what didn’t come? Vehicles down our driveway with parents picking up their kids. We were snowed in for three days with all those four-year-old boys. And Jamie Leigh. And Jenna.
I remember two things about that chaotic weekend very clearly. I remember that when we went out to feed the cows Saturday morning and again Saturday afternoon - cows eat well during Southern snowstorms - I thought my eyes were going to freeze shut and that my hands would fall off before we got back to the barn.
The other thing I remember concerns Jesus’s mama, of all people.
1993 was back in the day, when Nancy Fowler was attracting thousands and thousands of people to Rockdale County on the 13th of each month by claiming to receive a vision from the Virgin Mary. Whether she did or didn’t, I can’t say, but I know that you couldn’t get a table at Shoney’s or any other restaurant on or about the 13th of the month and you wouldn’t even think about trying to drive to Walnut Grove on Highway 138. The crowds multiplied exponentially if the 13th fell on a weekend.
On the Saturday of the blizzard, Karen Minton, who recently retired after 33 years at WSB, was doing the weather and had to read a list of storm-related closings. Somehow, with a straight face, she read that the “Virgin Mary Apparition in Conyers is cancelled due to weather”
Bless her heart.
Keep your coats upstairs, don’t plant, just now and don’t clean out those fireplaces, either. Winter isn’t quite done with us, yet.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Georgia's winter storm will soon bring ice and snow
