When It Snows in a Southern City

When it snows in a southern city there are three types of people. There are probably a lot more than three types of people, but I am going to limit it to these three types as they make up the majority of people. The first type is the person who they themselves or their family lived in a northern city at one point or another in their lives and will consistently tell you that they used to get this much snow all the time. The six inches that falls every four years in a southern city was a Tuesday where they are from.

These are the people most likely to get stuck on the road, because they know how to drive in the snow. They know how to drive in the snow in a city that routinely gets this amount of snow and is set up to deal with it. They do not know how to drive on untreated roadways in a city with one snowplow.

The second type of person is the one who has only lived in the south, has never lived anywhere else, and has no interest in ever living anywhere where your can’t wear t-shirts at least nine months out of the year. This person is the person that the first type is making fun of. They won’t leave their house. They look outside in the morning and see a dusting of snow and call it a day.

This type gives into one of the worst qualities of human nature. They believe the current condition is going to be a permanent one. If there is six inches of snow on the road at 8:00 AM then certainly there is going to be six inches of snow on the road at 8:00 PM and they cannot possibly leave their house for a month. These are also the people that buy all the bread, milk, and toilet paper before any depth of snow is forecast by the local weatherman.

Then there is the third type of person. This is the type we all believe we are. This is the person that might have lived in Boston, Estonia, the Arctic Circle, or anywhere that gets more snow than a southern city, but they don’t advertise it. They aren’t going to brag about it or tell you how this isn’t a lot of snow where they are from because they realize they aren’t where they are from. This is also the type of person that will stay indoors until it is safe to venture out because they realize they live in a southern city with one snow plow, but they also realize they live in a southern city that won’t stay below freezing for the entire day and hasn’t had freezing ground temperatures for longer than 24 hours before the snowfall and that while that six inches is on the ground at 8:00 AM it will be gone under the heat of the noon day sun.

Those are the three types of people you’ll find when it snows in a southern city. Call them the overconfident, the overcautious, and the rational or whatever else you want, but if you are ever in a southern city when it snows you’ll recognize them right away.