by Robert Spalding

Created on: January 12, 2009

Ah, winter at the Jersey shore. You know that one or two inch layer of snow that you can make snow men and snow angels with and is easy to drive on and really does nothing but look pretty, we don't get that. What we get is thirty five degrees with rain that turns to sheets of ice or we get two windblown feet of nastiness.

What really is odd though is that as soon as the weather man says the "S" word nearly everyone runs out and stocks up on a week's supply of milk, bread and eggs. This combination has always seemed a bit odd to me because it's always made me wonder if everyone expects to survive a blizzard by dining only on French toast. When you add the abundant supply of maple syrup in the grocery stores I can only wonder about the survival instincts of my neighbors.

When I was a kid my mother was not one of those who expected to survive on dry French toast. She was always too much of a pessimist, "why buy milk?" she'd say "if the power goes out it will go sour." She'd prepare for inbound storms by stocking up on soda, chips, boxed donuts and canned soup. Clearly my mother had better survival instincts than most everyone else even if she did mortgage our nutrition. It is probably fortunate for my teeth that my mother didn't panic every time the word snow was uttered on the news and only stocked up on such "necessities" when it was obvious a storm was coming and she expected we'd be stuck in the house for a day or more.

That's another thing about where I grew up as kids we rarely missed school because of snow. Sure we missed school for icy roads or because too many roads were flooded or my favorite too many teachers were snowed in at their homes five miles away. Believe me there as a nine year old there was nothing as fun as getting to school only to find out there weren't enough teachers to have school that day. Occasionally, though, we got one of those blizzards that dumped two feet or more on our little barrier island town and those storms shut things down for days.

One of those storms hit when I was ten years old. I remember because my parents had just split up for the first of what would be several times before they finally decided they couldn't live together. As usually happens when a storm that big hits the forecast called for a "dusting." Of course every single station bragged that they had called this storm accurately after it came. Weather forecasters are the masters of foresight after all.

I'm not sure anyone is really sure how much snow actually fell

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