Making the Snow Call
This trip has taken me to the North Carolina mountains, northern Alabama, and now to New York City amid Super Bowl mania, while experiencing several climatic zones and types of weather. Temperate at first in Asheville, followed by a few inches of snow, cold and dry in Huntsville, and now seasonally chilly in NY, so it is no surprise that this map about how much snow it takes to cancel school caught my attention.
The map helps me understand why things about snow seem so conflicted in St. Louis, where I live now. We are on the border, as in so many things, between the 1 inch and 3 inch zones. We pretend at times to be more like a Sunbelt State, but usually get nasty enough weather to be thoroughly Midwestern. It also explains why I so regularly experience my fellow St. Louisans as wimps when it comes to snow--I grew up in one of those thoroughly blue areas of the Intermountain West.The map also exposes one of the cardinal differences among regions in being head of a school. Making the snow call is easy in the dark blue or the spring green, but fraught in between. No wonder it is so hard to get right.