In Maryland, the forecast of a crippling snowstorm (anything bringing an inch or more) leads to a stampede to the grocery store, where panic-stricken residents empty the shelves of milk, bread and toilet paper. I don't know if the prospect of snow creates a craving for calcium and vitamin D, accompanied by loss of control of body functions, or if the shoppers think that when the bread runs out they may have to subsist on a nutritious, high-fiber meal of toilet tissue soaked in milk. Delicious cold or hot!
In the south, people head straight to the liquor store at the forecast of frozen precipitation. No one's houses are insulated, so they feel the need to load up on antifreeze and deaden sensation so they won't notice the cold. It's probably a form of the dormancy exhibited by certain animals in adverse conditions. Fish and frogs burrow into the mud of evaporating ephemeral pools, hoping to remain vaguely alive until refreshing rains recreate their habitat. In other climates amphibians rest on the bottom of frozen ponds. Inebriated southerners awaiting the return of their normal temperatures fit neatly into this category.
In the north, residents try to act as much as possible as if nothing at all is happening while blizzard winds blast the landscape. Some of them even affect short pants throughout the entire season. And everyone has seen the news coverage of the various polar bear and penguin clubs taking unseasonable swims to mark the new year or some other significant occasion. Let's not even talk about how some people drive, as if their vehicle generated its very own patch of Floridian road under itself.
When wintry weather threatens us up here, we buy whatever we happen to need at the grocery store and go home to watch TV until the power goes out. We save our real panic for summer's heat waves, when the mercury might top 70 DEGREES for days at a time. That's another whole story.
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