Pardon me for saying so, but Southerners do most things better than Yankees. We can skin a raccoon, fry up a mess of collard greens and – for sure – we write Southern literature much better than folks north of the Mason-Dixon.
But there’s one thing we can’t do worth a dern. That’s snow.
We can’t clean it up because we don’t have enough scrapers. We can’t dress for it because they don’t sell enough down-filled parkas and wool long-handles here. We can’t walk in it because we only own decorative boots. We can’t let our kids go to school in it because their brains apparently don’t work well in it. We don’t have the right toys to play in it, so we use trash bags and other such junk. And we can’t drive in it.
Oh, we think we can. We get out in our cars and just speed around like it’s a day at a pig pickin’, and before you can say Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the Daytona 500, we’re in a ditch and we’ve taken a whole slew of other cars with us.
That’s what happened today at the Fort Eustis exit at the most northern edge of the 20-mile-long city where I live, Newport News, Virginia. One somebody driving too fast for dry conditions -- much less in snow falling like dandruff from God’s beard -- tapped on the brakes, startling the person behind, who was following too close even if the road hadn’t been covered with ice thick enough to skate on.
(That, too, is Southern. We believe that if you ride somebody’s bumper real tight-like, you’ll get there a mite quicker, you know, unless you get shot for it, and then it don’t matter much.)
Well, before you know it, 70 cars littered the road and shoulders like cow pies steaming in Farmer Brown’s field. It made quite a mess and kept the Smokies busy for quite a spell trying to sort it all out.
And as a reward for all of our spiffy driving, we got on the national news! Woo-hoo! But they got the town wrong, saying the pile-up happened in Williamsburg, which is the only place folks up north seem to know about in this neck of the woods.
That’s alright. We’ll take their money any way we can get it. Spends fine down here, too. We’ll need it to fix up all of our cars.
