Comments on: Back When I Was a Kid, We Had Real Winters!

By: a daughter's mother

a daughter's mother — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:18:34 +0000

My memories of snow amounts relate to whether I could play in it/with it, or whether I had to shovel it/drive through it. Once I grew up and had the responsibility instead of the pleasure of dealing with the snow, the remembered totals got higher, and then after I switched to front wheel drive, they dropped again. But who these days needs to remember to shift up into 2nd gear to climb a snowy slippery curving hill so you don’t skid all over with rear wheel drive? I’m sure as I age and become less physically capable of dealing with snow disasters, they snowfall inches will start to increase again. Then it’s time to retire to Arizona.

By: Leo

Leo — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:59:22 +0000

Hey Greg. I’m from Cooperstown actually. Watertown’s winters were much worse!

Offtopic: Ooo… I really like this WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin. I’m going to have to add it to some of my blogs.

By: flynn

flynn — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:13:12 +0000

I used to think we had more snow when I was a kid, too. Then I figured out that my parents shoveled our huge long wide driveway, and our neighbors shoveled the nearby driveway, and the result was awesome tunnel-and-fort piles. Plus, yes, I was short. And I would spend as much time as possible dragging around in the snow, licking icicles and soaking through pair after pair of mittens, which was quite different from my usual daily round.

I figured out the truth when I remembered that any significant amount of snow would close the schools. On snow days, we were required to watch the educational fill-in programming that the school system provided (my mom was a hard-core ex-teacher). If we had had a lot of snow, I would remember those shows more than vaguely, and I would be able to think of more snow forts and tunnels, not just a few spread over ~12 years. Come to think of it, most of our snowmen wound up with a lot of grass in them.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:59:18 +0000

Leo, are you from Watertown????

By: Leo

Leo — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:39:33 +0000

I grew up in Central NYS, and lived in that region until just a couple of years ago. It’s certainly my perception that there was much more snow twenty and thirty years ago than there has been in the past decade. Many years that we went trick-or-treating, it was snowing. It was always cold! I recall at least an inch or two of snow on the ground at Thanksgiving and there was almost always a couple of feet or more of snow by Christmas. We regularly had a January thaw where it would get freakishly warm for a few days (sometimes into the mid-50s), melting most of the snow off. This would be followed by two months of sheer icy hell. We actually looked forward to a winter where it would snow an inch or two every single day instead of the sleet and freezing rain we usually got (on top of the snow). It was not uncommon to have a blizzard on or about Easter either. Usually it was well into May before all the snow was gone.

I also remember our school using up every single one of its snow days each year.

I like to think my memories are fairly accurate, if only because from 1981 through 1986 I delivered newspapers Monday through Saturday. On bike in the late spring, and on foot in the winters. Also, it was a 3/4 of a mile to the school bus stop so it’s safe to say I was outside a lot.

That seemed to change somewhere starting in the 1990s, but there have been at least a couple of notable blizzards and extraordinarily snowy seasons in the past few years. For instance, just a few years ago I recall us having 100″ of snow on the ground by Christmas.

By: Erin R

Erin R — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:02:51 +0000

As another Pacific Northwester, I can state with some certainty that on the floor of the Willamette Valley snow accumulation has been far more frequent in the last few years. How do I know? When you’re a kid, growing up on the no-snow valley floor, every snow day you get is a very, very big deal.

In elementary school, (95-2000) we didn’t have a single snow day in my town. We had one two hour delay. I remember it very well, because the town next to us got out of school for the day. In middle school, the first week back from Winter Break we had three snow days in a row. It was crazy. Then, high school. Sophomore year we had a snow day in March, Junior year we had four or five, and Senior year we had four or five, and snow on Christmas. And in the years since I’ve left the PNW, we’ve had two more winters with enough snow for school cancellation (and enough snow for flight cancellation, which made coming home for Christmas last year very, very difficult…)

This is only over two decades, of course. I’m curious as to how these two decades compare to ones in the past…

By: Carolyn

Carolyn — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:16:04 +0000

Well, my current city (Toronto) just had the first snowless November since the beginning of the weather records (as noted by all the news agencies). Climate change does mean some places will have less snow.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:31:34 +0000

What if you remember it the other way around? I grew up in Colorado and I recall a couple of really awesome storms from 5-8 (and I was right, during one of those years we had our last big blizzard until a couple years ago). Then we went through about 10 years or so of drought when snow rarely stayed on the ground more than a day and we could have months in winter with none at all! Then of course the year I head to the Pacific NW we get an awesome blizzard (3-7ft) and it’s been snowier than my entire childhood since then.

*sigh* Why did I move to the cold rain, I loved snow.

By: Stephanie Zvan

Stephanie Zvan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:26:30 +0000

Tracy, I’m very glad to hear that imaginary boyfriends are good for getting people home in the snow. Take care and stay warm.

By: Tracy

Tracy — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:48:01 +0000

I think that indeed, some of the sense that there was more snow “back then” is more a result of accumulation–fewer freeze/thaws. I don’t necessarily remember more snow storms when I was young. What I don’t remember is the snow melting in between. I’m too lazy to look up weather data for my area just now, but I do feel that when I was a kid, it would have been a remarkable thing, something to be commented on, should it have rained in January. Happy to know if anyone else wants to look that up.

In the meantime, I’m going to go downstairs and wait to be picked up from work in the truck (because nothing else could be gotten out of our driveway, through the ten inches of wet snow) and go back to my house, which has no power (no heat, no water, no lights) and think about how snowy “now” is.