As I banged around the house on our extra winter “break” last week, languishing over whether or not we’d have school each day and how in the world I’d get my students back on track when we finally returned to academia, I had plenty of time to peruse social media. There were lots of pictures of huge snowdrifts from “back in the day” and many comments about how much tougher certain generations were growing up. By golly, they would have had school every day last week.
No, they would not have. I’m in my 40s, and I recall plenty of days off from school growing up. There were a lot of times I can recall sledding and building snow tunnels in the banks Dad made by plowing the driveway. There were many winters we had a ton of snow. Calling off school often depends on timing; if it snows in the evening, that gives plows time to clear everything. When it starts snowing at 2 a.m. and doesn’t finish until 10 a.m., you might not have school. A few hours makes all the difference.
But I think that the amount of snow I thought we had wasn’t really as much as I remember. My parents have a big evergreen in the front yard (we lived in the country, so our front yard was a large area). We have pictures of my sisters and me standing on top of a snow bank near the top of the tree. Wow, that was a huge snow bank!
Then I really looked at that tree when I was home once. Wait a minute. It wasn’t that big when I was twelve! The tree has grown substantially in those 30-some years, and so have my recollections. There was still a lot of snow, but the extra ten feet on the tree since then are also a big number.
So our memories are always a bit diluted with time. Things were never quite as we remember them, are they? Not if we’re honest with ourselves. Saying we used to endure tougher winters is a fallacy.
One ongoing thread I saw was how we never missed school because of the windchill. That might be correct. However, most of us had Mom at home to drive us out to wait for the bus in a heated car. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, almost everyone I knew had someone home with them until they got on a bus for school.
Today, not so much. The world has changed greatly. Because of various occupations, many kids wake up without a parent around. They have to get ready by themselves and get to school and maybe help younger brothers or sisters as well. This is not a judgment, it’s just a fact. Many households have both parents with a job, and there are more single-parent homes in today’s society.
Schools have to take that into account when the temperatures get as low as they did last week. It never used to be a consideration, even when I started in education, but in the last decade, we’ve probably had more late starts because of temperature than because of snow. It’s important to keep our kids safe.
Remember this, too, that the higher powers changed the windchill formula some time ago. I was told last week that the -60 windchills we had equated to -95 back when we were kids. Youch! And just think, when the mercury hits 90 degrees this summer, that we were more than 100 degrees colder in January!
Can I add this too? If I have to see one more person post that the temperatures we had are a sign that global warming is not real, I might explode. Listen, we have climate change going on. Climate change involves an overall warming of the earth; the average temperature every year has been rising. We still have seasons though.
The vast, potentially catastrophic changes in our climate mean that we will have colder spells in the winter and warmer times in the summer. The polar vortex that descended on us last week was a result of warmer air from a different part of the world. There are people who can explain it even better than I, but climate change is real. We need to make changes so our children and grandchildren don’t inherit a world that will not be as hospitable to life.
Here’s hoping we won’t have another week like last week anytime soon. But our kids will probably always remember, and embellish upon, that frigid week. By golly, it was the worst week ever, they’ll tell their kids. And then someone of our generation will say, “Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you about the Halloween storm of ’91…”
Word of the Week: This week’s word is gelid, which means very cold and icy, as in, “The gelid temperatures were the lowest on record in over 20 years.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!