PLATTEVILLE, March 18 — For those keeping score at home, here’s how the weather week went:
March 9: Record high of 69 degrees, breaking the previous record by 4 degrees.
March 10: The season’s first severe thunderstorm watch and warning are issued.
Friday: High winds threaten to blow everything from Platteville into Lafayette County. The National Weather Service issues a winter storm watch for Saturday night, which prompts the WIAA to move sectional final boys basketball games from the evening to the afternoon.
Saturday: Did we say Saturday for the winter storm? The NWS meant Sunday. (Or the storm changed its mind.)
Sunday: The wind arrives late in the day, but no snow, reminding one of the “half of the minimum” prediction from apocalyptic-sounding storm forecasts.
Monday: Those with north-facing screen doors open their doors to find that snow has blown through their screen doors into their north-facing doors. Dogs’ legs disappear into the snow that did in fact fall. The sun comes out in the afternoon blinding everyone used to the gloom of the past few days.
Tuesday: Despite the fact that the color white is not normally associated with St. Patrick’s Day, more snow is forecast (as of Monday).
Friday: Forecasted high (as of Monday): 61.
In what was an example of either terrific or terrible timing, Platteville schools were not canceled due to the weather. Platteville schools weren’t open Monday because it was their spring break, dovetailing with UW–Platteville’s spring break. Imagine wasting a snow day because you don’t have school anyway.
When I was going to school in the 20th century in Madison, the only way students could find out if they didn’t have school, or had the start of school delayed, was on radio or TV around the time they woke up. There were no social media notifications, nor were there text messages, automated phone calls (either of which will wake you up before you normally get up), emails or social media messages to announce they had two additional hours to get to school or that they didn’t have to go to school. Going to school in a school district that met no one’s definition of “rural” meant that the lengthy alphabetical list of closed schools usually went from “Lodi” to “Marshall” while skipping over “Madison.”
Of course, the realization that missing school in the winter meant going to more school when the weather was better didn’t dawn on those celebrating their day off. That particularly didn’t occur to any of us Madison students who got an extra two weeks (minus about an hour) off due to the January 1976 teacher strike. Making up those days not only wiped out our Easter vacation (as it was known at the time), but forced us to go to school for two more days at the end of the school year and, in the greatest of indignities, on one Saturday. My Catholic school best friend lorded (so to speak) that one over me for a while.
But we did get one bonus day off that 1975–76 school year. It didn’t get my attention until after the fact, but earlier this month was the 50th anniversary of the epic March 1976 ice storm that killed electric power for a week or more in this area. Out here farmers stayed with their cattle while their families stayed somewhere that had heat and electricity.
Our parental snow day history began when our school district (not around here) was the only school district to not call off school, only to call off school at noon after about an hour, forcing me to get our oldest child from elementary school. (The next day the school district doubled down on parental inconvenience by being the only area school district to start school late.) After I observed that it wasn’t that bad out, we created the odd snow-day tradition of going to eat (or later get for home consumption) Chinese food. That first snow day lunch we observed a high school student do a 360-degree spin in the parking lot with his four-wheel-drive pickup truck, proving that safer and more capable vehicles make for worse, or at least dumber, drivers.
The youthful snow day thrill loses its luster for adults, who are still expected to get work done. There is also the required removal of the snow that prompted said school cancellations. Children no longer living in your house means parents can’t assign them to shovel outside. At this point, since I have been told repeatedly by medical professionals that wiping out would be bad for me, I can’t really attach a snow shovel to a walker, nor can I run a snowblower with one incomplete leg, and we don’t have a tractor with a snowplow. I can think of two things that if I get rid of them this second it will be not soon enough.
