At the last writer’s group we got another assignment, but several people had to leave early and there wasn’t time to finish it, so we essentially got the challenge with a week to finish. So what would have been a piece of flash fiction grew into a 3300 word story that I wrote yesterday. I may want to do something else with this one, once I get the tweaks tweaked and the bugs debugged.  Working title is “Have a Good Day,” with a nod to Jerome Bixby. If you don’t get the reference, clearly you haven’t watched enough of the old Twilight Zone tv series. You’re also probably an infant.

It was snowing this morning, here in Mississippi. I know, I know, but this is the South. As in the Deep South. As in “Way below Tennessee South.”  Down here, snow is rare and therefore a big deal. To give you some perspective, in the first seventeen years of my life it only snowed three times that I can recall. Once was a blizzard of nine inches, which pretty much shut everything down for a couple of days. Making snowmen and throwing snowballs are not art forms that we excel at, mainly because we get very little practice.

None today, either. Nothing was sticking, nor did we expect it to do so. Which was good, don’t get me wrong. We don’t do snow well, see above. There are no snowplows. At best the highway department will drop some sand and salt on the bridges, and that only because we do get ice storms far more frequently. No one knows how to drive on ice, so they drive like the normally do–lousy. It’s best that we don’t have any snow on the road.

My wife and I lived in north Alabama for a few years, and that was all it took for me to lose a lot of my fascination with the flakey stuff. It snowed pretty much every year. Solid snow. Freezing cold, frozen streets, black ice, the works. The first time I put on the brakes and still slid right through a stop sign, that was when I realized that snow wasn’t the greatest thing ever. Back closer to my old stomping grounds, now I think I can love it again.

Just so long as I don’t have to shovel it.