Tonight I am trying to imagine snow. It was something like seventy degrees here in Columbia today and frankly, I am disappointed. It is supposed to be winter and winter, in my mind anyway, is a failure without snow.

I think I was born in the snow. I learned that my birthday was technically in the fall in first grade or so. I was utterly disappointed. December 21st is the first day of winter, I was born 4 days shy of being a winter baby. But, in Ohio we expect early snows. Snows that preceed winter itself.

The one thing people kept telling me when we decided to move to South Carolina is that I would love the winters. You can go outside on Christmas day without a coat. It can be up to 70 degrees! I kept wondering why on earth that would be appealing. Christmas afternoon is for sledding, for spending huddled up with family inside, looking out on my parent's back yard, a sloping white hill, the branches of the trees encapsulated by ice. When the sun comes out, the brightness is almost too much for sunglasses to tame. It is radiant.

Maxine used to quote some superstition that I think her father taught her when she was young. A green Christmas means a fat cemetery. She is full of superstition, but I the more I think about it, the more superstition seems to have its roots in something solid. The idea that a snowless Christmas portends an unusually high number of deaths in the coming year seemed ridiculous to me as a child. Then I experienced a few. There is nothing more depressing to me than a green Christmas. Winter, and especially the holidays, has a higher number of suicides than the rest of the seasons. The color washes out of the Ohio landscape in the winter. Color doesn't go away completely, but the land begins to look like one of those old black and white photographs that has had color added to it later. The slope downward into Seasonal Affectation Disorder is a steep and slippery one when looking at a scene like that.

Snow blankets our wet, dead misery. The accompanying ice makes even the most mundane objects shine. The iron gray sky, so deeply sad, loses its power against the force of bright white.

Here in Columbia, none of that matters. It is warm, and the plants have retained their greenness. The leaves continue to grow on the trees. I feel as if I have missed winter altogether.

The morning after the only snow that has fallen here this year, I woke up entirely energized. The night before had been a big night, more because of the snow than because of the Sanford signing. The backyard of the triplex where we live looked like a wonderland, a totally different place than the frightening tangled mess of bushes and brambles I am accustomed to. Everything was illuminated, covered in snow which reflected back the city lights. Elisha and I made snowballs from the accumulation on our steps and threw them at nothing. At the car and the neighbor's fence. And that next morning the bedroom was bright in the way that a room can only be in the winter, as the sun reflects off the snow. Light falls from the sky and bounces off of the ground. Radiant.

I knew God was smiling on me. I knew He was remembering, just as I was, the blizzard of my second grade year. My mother made us dress for twenty minutes before letting us go out that winter. There was always another layer she could add to our clothes. We ran like maniacs through drifts that came up to our thighs and waists. Mom helped us build our own igloo, and at Maxine's, Darrell and Daddy Bill helped us pack down the snow on their hill into sleek sled tracks. Our little plastic sled disks always hit the piles of snow at the bottom, throwing us a few feet into more piles of snow, which served as cushioning for the crash. One of the best winters of my life.

The winter of 2007-2008, right after Elisha and I were married, my family decided to go to the lake to sled down the dam. A bunch of bored college students were already at the dam. None of us, including the college students, had real sleds. It was mostly pool equipment (intertubes, inflatable pool rafts, and boogie boards) and some of it we covered with cheap trash bags for added velocity. We nearly killed ourselves. Our inflatables popped, trashbags ripped and we continued rolling down the incredibly steep hill. We screamed out our laughter the entire time, our faces red and frozen.

Last winter, the year of disastrous ice storms, Elisha and I became trapped on top of Carriage Hill, the steep hill where our apartment complex was located. It was dangerous just to try to walk down that hill. Everyone who tried to drive up or down ended up just another car in the 7+ car pile up at the bottom. The apartment manager attempted to get a snow plow for us, but the plow, complete with chains on the tires, slid back down the hill as well. Since the ice and snow had shut down the city of Athens for a day, Elisha and I snuggled up warm together on the couch, eating the gourmet olives I had splurged on and watching a day long marathon of the X-files.

I don't love warm winters, as a matter of fact. It seems like something has gone out of the natural order of life. I don't have any complaints against snow. Even the time my car did doughnuts down the highway after hitting a skid, I was sad to see the snow that caused the skid melt away.

There are compromises no matter where you live. Honestly, snow is something necessary for a good winter. A good winter is necessary for a good year.

This has been Columbia's coldest year in a while. I think perhaps my earnest desire for something homey and familiar has stayed the warm weather. God is smiling on me. Columbia may be in for it after all.

On Meeting The Woman Behind the Man Who Embarrassed a State

This blog is dedicated to Aunt Patty. Happy Birthday. (apologies for its belatedness)


When I say "the woman behind the man," I mean Mrs. Jenny Sanford. And, when I say "met," I mean I sort of stood near her for a while.


Mrs. Jenny Sanford decided, for a reason I suppose I understand, to kick off her book signing tour at the bookstore where I work. This bookstore, which I shall leave nameless, is pretty unimpressive, but it is near to downtown Columbia. I guess if you're going to stick it to your philandering husband, best to do it closest to his home and office.

We had planned to have a crowd of about 500 people attending the signing that night. We had almost every manager on staff to help direct employees and crowds and so many employees that the managers seemed to have a hard time figuring out where to put everyone. We had all been informed that there would be press there to cover the signing, which was to last two hours. Normally, store employees and managers don't take much thought about what we wear to work. We are supposed to have clothes that would be appropriate in a business casual setting. We are always more casual than business, but we have those lanyard things around our necks, so it doesn't really matter. You can tell we're employees. However, because of the camera crews and the possibility of ending up on the front of a local newspaper or on a local tv channel, we all took extra pains to ensure that we truly did look nice. Everyone had on dressy shirts and the girls wore their nicest costume jewelry. I had actually cared about my hair that day and had done my best to fix it. I also wore panty hose, an article of clothing that I loathe, to ensure that if they did get a picture of me, my chicken legs wouldn't seem so discolored and hairy.

All week we had been preparing the store for her arrival. We straightened the books with special diligence, we dusted and moved tables. The night before her arrival, I personally (with some help from a manager who was already off-duty) pulled a fallen urinal cake out of the toilet it happened to be clogging with nothing but a pair of rubber gloves and two paperclips hooked together. We couldn't wait for the cleaning crew to get it. We had to stop the mess in its tracks.

That night, I walked into the store to begin my seven hour shift, and I was eager about it. It seemed silly to me, even then, to be so excited about the event. I mean, after all, we were going to have to clean up the mess that Mrs. Sanford's fans left behind. And more than that, we were going to have to control that crowd of fans. I had learned already from a book signing by Jan Brett, the children's illustrator, that controlling these sort of fanatical people was nearly impossible. But I always love a break from the norm, no matter how difficult it may be.

I was disappointed to learn that I would be nowhere near all the hubbub. I was to be stuck behind the cash register all night, selling Mrs. Sanford's memoir to the impatient people who were getting in line for the signing. Fantastic. I hate being stuck behind the cash register. Standing in that one spot makes time move so slowly that you don't care about what time you're off, because you're pretty sure you'll be dead before then. But I wasn't alone. There were two other people acting as cashiers as well, and all of us were from places where people were used to snow. I bring that up because a forecast of snow had been given that day for Columbia and people were all jittery about it. Well, actually, they weren't really jittery at all, a fact that really let me down. I was really looking forward to mass pandemonium, you know - grocery stores being cleared out, people fighting over the last can of tuna - that sort of thing. But nobody really believed it was coming at all.

At about five o'clock the other cashiers and I discovered that if you stared out the window without blinking for about twenty seconds, you would be able to see the tiny snowflakes that happened to be falling. We laughed a little, dubbed it The Blizzard, and turned back to waiting on customers.

Time passed, and the snowflakes got bigger and kept coming. The forecasted 1-2 inches was becoming more like 5 or 6 inches. The turn out for the Sanford signing was looking like it would be pretty pathetic. And it was. At about seven o'clock I was pulled from my register and told that I had a "new job." We had to start the signing because Mrs. Sanford insisted on returning to Charleston that night instead of staying the night in a local hotel. I was given the job of standing beside Mrs. Sanford's table and taking the books from eager customers, making sure they had flipped it to the right page and then handing it to Mrs. Sanford's assistants, who in turn handed the books to her.

For over an hour I stood there, less than three feet from her as she talked with people about the snow, thanked them for their support, assured them that this book was written as a salve for women who had been through similar situations, that it was not at all written to embarrass her husband while promoting herself. And when women who almost certainly had been through similar situations stood before her trying to wipe the tears off of their cheeks before people began to notice, she took their hands and promised to pray for them. She told them they could make it if they stayed strong and true.

I found it really rather thoughtless on the part of the planning team that Mrs. Sanford's signing desk had been set up directly across from our Happy Valentine's Day display table. I didn't think that her decision to kick off her signing on Valentine's Day weekend was so surprising. I figured that it was meant to either instill pity for her or rage against her husband (or both) in her supporters. But the table being so near by was truly an accident, one that deeply amused me. There was a certain obliviousness in some of the people who showed up for the signing as well. There were quite a few husbands who came with their pregnant wives, or who came alone to have the book signed as a gift for their wives for Valentine's day. "Aren't you sweet to do that for her!" Mrs. Sanford made this comment to each husband without batting an eye. Her ability to smile at these men so sweetly and sincerely reawakened my fear of politicians.

I suppose I had a part in the irony that night as well, Right after I left Mrs. Sanford's table to go home (we were all sent home early due to weather conditions) I picked up a card for my husband. Casablanca themed.

The weather slashed the number of visitors from five hundred to less than two hundred. The hoards of press we had expected turned out to be five people, two with large cameras, one with a news video camera, one with a camera phone and one with just a note pad and pencil. One of the large camera people left the scene after about fifteen minutes, as did the video man. Two of the others, Camera Phone Man and Note Pad Lady, stayed for almost all of it. The only one who stayed the entire time was the other man with the large camera. I began to suspect, after a while, that he was actually hired by Mrs. Sanford herself. While the other reporters attempted to interview people in line about Mrs. Sanford, he took shots of her empathetically holding hands with people and he took shots of her laughing with people.

Apparently the rest of the South Carolina Press was out filming The Blizzard. My co-worker told me later that she had seen a snippet of the signing on the news. It flitted on and off the screen in between shots of snow covered streets. My face appeared on a corner of the screen for about half a second. I guess the bigger news story actually won out. Politicians mess around every day. Columbia hasn't seen a snow like that in years.