Wishing I was in the Winter Wonderland
Twenty-seven inches at JFK? Forty inches in parts of West Virginia? Thundersnow in Nashville?
Winter Storm Jonas engulfed the northeast, southeast and mid-Atlantic of the U.S. with record snowfalls this past weekend causing entire metropolises and states to shut down.
And I’m super jealous I couldn’t be there.
I’m a sucker for fun weather, which includes society crippling snownamis, trailer park annihilating tornadoes and the like.
Blame my upbringing. My mother’s a junkie when it comes to experiencing severe weather. She’s the one who woke me up in the middle of the night to watch lightning or made me take a free shower when it rained.
Cute, right? Trust me, she could be more sinister.
It was a humid, summer day when I was five years old when a tornado-producing storm came through my hometown. The sirens had been blaring for a few minutes and the winds had already brought down some tree branches in my front yard before my mom and sisters arrived home from a cancelled dance practice.
She was thrilled about the giant thunderhead coming towards us from the west. In her blind excitement, she dragged me and kept my sisters me outside against our wishes to watch this behemoth approach. I was already drenched in my own tears before I she even got home because I saw Twister a couple of days before that storm.
Tornadoes REALLY freaked me out at the time.
Mother Dearest knew this, didn’t care and shoved the adrenaline rush down my throat until common sense to look after the safety of her children prevailed her to go indoors.
Well, to her credit, her methods work. The junkie got me hooked and now I can’t help but feel a little left out knowing I can’t experience Jonas.
Like how a Tootsie Roll likes to be at the center of a Tootsie Pop, I like to be in the center of the action when it comes to weather. It would be a dream come true if I could go storm chasing in Tornado Alley or be in southern Asia during monsoon season. Mother helped me become the kind of person who goes outside when the sirens come on, not the basement.
But powerful storms shouldn’t be underestimated.
Winter Storm Jonas resulted in the deaths of 41 people.
My prayers go out to their families and friends.
Severe storms like Jonas are dangerous. This amount of snow and at the frequency it fell, with some areas experiencing three inches per hour at the storm’s peak, render roadways useless. Even all the snowplows in Minnesota couldn’t keep up. People shouldn’t be interacting with storms as powerful as Jonas, if possible. Seek shelter, binge Netflix and stay put. These storms can and will harm you.
Yet, if I found myself in this beast’s belly, I don’t know if anything I just said would make a difference to me.
I would have to go play in it. I would need to experience it. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. There’s no lie, only truth when I say I wish I could’ve been within the bowels of that blizzard more than anything.
You had me at thundersnow.
