Snow Paralyzes Nashville

My hometown of Nashville, Tennessee had some accumulating snow over the weekend- by no means a North-country style blizzard but a mere two or three inches that ground Music City to a halt. Freezing precipitation in the forecast is good news for our grocery stores as they sell every jug of milk and loaf of bread (indeed most comestible items disappear although I have never witnessed a run on Brussels sprouts). My own parents who live less than a half mile away from a Harris Teeter brought in enough to feed twenty-five people as the flakes started to fly (thankfully omitting Brussels sprouts) but buying copious amounts of much else. What are a pair of senior citizens going to do with five gallons of dairy before it expires? Bathe in it- I suppose as it hovers around ten degrees Fahrenheit outside in the fifty-nine degree house that dear old pater is too cheap to warm comfortably. Another group that is overjoyed when Nashville has frozen precip is our wrecker service- with every tow truck being brought into rescue stranded motorists and assuring the tow drivers a vastly more prosperous Christmas (for them and their families). This driving into the ditch trend is caused by the unique mindsets of two types of driver: grannies (not sex specific or really so much age-related as there are young timid drivers as well) who slow to ten miles an hour in places where the posted speed limit is forty and the second group- the cowboys (once again not gender specific) who may make some small concession to the forming road ice and slow from sixty to a mere forty-five in the forty mph zone before spinning out of control or brushing one of the granny drivers off the pavement. You just have to love the winter in places this far South where a minor snowfall becomes a prolonged siege.