Bread and Toilet Paper: How One Word Changes Everything

It’s coming!!! …the BIG snowstorm of the century, or at least our biggest in the past four years. Once again in anticipation, schools & businesses jumped the gun last night & started closing everything, only to find out from the next Weather-To-Go forecast that the arrival wouldn’t be a morning event but a late afternoon one.  Foiled again! Kids are missing another day of school & will be sitting in hot classrooms far into the summer. But it’s best to err on the side of caution.

The city has been tossing chemicals on the highways & bridges since we were supposed to get a light snow Saturday morning that never materialized … but the roads have been ready. They’ve even been using that new beet juice concoction that melts ice & snow.  So far, though, we haven’t been able to find out if “vegetable intervention” has been a worthy opponent for ice & snow because it simply hasn’t happened. But it’s coming & beets will get their chance to prove themselves worthy… or not.

Schools & highways notwithstanding, some of us have grown skeptical about snow. It’s not really the fault of our meteorologists that our faith has been shaken. They tell us what’s coming & it’s not their fault that, so far, the weather patterns have changed abruptly & cheated us out of the predicted weather event.

This time is probably the time we should abandon our skeptical mentality because I don’t think we’re going to dodge this bullet. All maps & predictions tell us its coming & it is coming BIG … headed straight at us.

Looking out my kitchen window I’ve noticed that the next street over is lined with cars that usually are stored & stationed in garages & driveways. Today my neighbors have moved their vehicles onto the street for an easier get-away & Willy, who works for the power company, packed a bag this morning & left telling me he didn’t know when he’d see me again. I’d like to think all these precautions are “overkill,” but they probably aren’t.

What surprised me earlier this week is that the grocery stores hadn’t been inundated with frenzy snow shoppers until Tuesday evening. I stopped by the store on my way home from a meeting on Monday morning & shelves were packed with bread, milk was stacked on top of other milk cartons, eggs were piled high in the cooler & toilet paper was an abundant commodity. These are usually the “great predictors” of snow events above & beyond what we hear on the Weather Channel. Not so on Monday morning. So while I was there, & having heard the forecast for later in the week, I stocked up on all those necessities.

I don’t understand why we assume that a big snowstorm is going to keep us locked up in the house until the spring thaw but it seems I share that mentality. While it was available, as I said, I stocked up. We now have an entire shelf full of eggs in the fridge, enough milk to sustain a hotel full of growing children who need tooth & bone strengthening, enough bread to make sandwiches & toast until 2017 & 58 rolls of double ply toilet paper.

By news time on Tuesday evening when Wednesday evening’s snow storm  became a looming probability (we’d shifted from a Watch to a Warning), the rest of the city had been nudged into action by the S-word & cleaned the shelves of most local grocery & convenience stores. In Bread & Toilet Paper Land it’s amazing how the SNOW word changes everything & converts seemingly normal people into hoarders.

It’s looking really snow-like outside & I believe that by the time this is posted & read by several people, the snow will be upon us. Probably it’s MY fault for moaning & complaining in a previous blog post about us being missed by all the snow this winter. I keep thinking about that old proverb, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it …”

I’d like to say that I’m writing this post purely from the standpoint of an observer who is amazed by the affect just hearing the word SNOW has on people. And I CAN say that with conviction until I walk into our sun room where 58 rolls of double ply toilet paper are stacked up on the sofa with no chance of finding an empty cabinet large enough to hold them.

SNOW … (bread & toilet paper): it’s amazing how one word changes everything.