What Yankees Learn From Snow and Slush

When it is ninety degrees and you are, say, pushing a double stroller holding a two year old and infant down a Small Town street and also lugging a four year old, no one will stop to make sure you get across the street. They will not slow down to make sure you negotiate the curb okay. They will not offer to carry your bags to the car or give your children a lollipop or stop to talk to you for longer than it takes to ask directions to the bar or the launch or the landing.

But when there is nearly a foot of snow on the ground, everything changes. Even though that first winter season with my three kids is a blur -- a snow-suited, boob feeding, missing mittened blur -- I remember the kindness of strangers. Now that my life is more frenzy than blur (they are 9, 7 and 4), the snow and the way people tend to be when it swamps the Small Town? It's the same.

People talk to each other more. Once the winds slow down and the day breaks into tolerable flurries, the neighbors come out. They chat over snow-plowed mountains in their driveways. They climb into dug out cars and mosey slowly down the road, watching for sledders and errants snowballers, and ask neighbors if they need anything from the store. People seem more comfortable just stopping by unannounced while wearing ear-flapped hats. (I think I offered one of 'em a hot dog today: a HOT DOG!)

At the book store which is a sweet block and half away and down a long steep road in which the so-called traction control on my car actually seemed to work (hallelujah), it was just more of the same. The season and the snow and the Small Town looking the part seemed to bring out the best in us all. 

When I opened the door on the street side, a box truck slowed down and pretty much stopped while I slogged through the slush to get my daughter. We couldn't get to the sidewalk and had to wade down the street, hugging the parked cars as if we were being searched, and the truck just waited. Waited! Waited for us to get to the sidewalk safely. No one beeped. Someone waved and smiled.

Once we got into the store, I sent my kid on her way to pick and choose. I advised a stranger/Gramma on books for an 8 year old. I think she would have hugged me and maybe even kissed me after I hooked her up, but we are yankees and we don't do that.

Instead, what we do is talk longer to one another in public places after a storm. We make eye contact like it's the first time we ever had eyes and then, we consider a stranger to be less strange. It's the best we do of intimacy and because of Mother Nature, we seize it when we can.

We get buried, we dig out, we eventually go out, and then when we do, we look around for other human beings because we have just survived and in that moment, we are equal. In some dysfunctional New England way, the snow that we love to moan about connects us. 

Not so much in a kissy lovey let's be all friendly and close kind of way, but in the way that we in New England roll.  When it snows, the Kid will help a neighbor shovel and I will make eye contact with strangers for real and all of us in the frostiest of times will know that underneath the gloves and scarves and hats and the everything that binds us and separates us, and is.. well, ugh.. it's just that it is: we like each other. A lot.

But we will never speak of it. Ever. Until it snows again.