(HOST) As snow continues to pile up in the mid-Atlantic states, commentator Anne Averyt looks wistfully at her brown backyard and reports feeling sharp pangs of snow-envy.
(AVERYT) "Snow Shatters History Books in Washington, D.C."; "Philadelphia Buried"; "New York Hammered."
While south of us everyone seems to be up to their ears in white crystals, here in the North Country the forecast continues to resemble the recent movie title, "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs."
This has all been an enormous source of embarrassment for me personally. After all, this is Vermont. Vermont: the nation’s Winter Wonderland. Vermont: the word itself evokes Norman Rockwell images of country lanes and snow laden trees bending low beneath their weight of white.
Usually, I’m the one on the snowy end of phone calls, as my family in Philadelphia and D.C. check in to see how I’m surviving the latest Arctic blast. They want to know how the roads are, if I have enough milk and cat food, when do I think I’ll be able to get out.
Now, I call my son in Washington, who complains he’s spent the last three days off from work shoveling out his car, his driveway… and… his car, his driveway…. It’s a winter version of Sisyphus; the snows just keep coming.
Washington has now been dubbed the "District of Vermont," and new words have been added to the colloquial dictionary: snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon.
My daughter-in-law sends an online digital slideshow that is white and wonderful. It makes me want to weep. "50 inches and counting," she reports.
But for many, the ooos and ahhhs of early snow-awe are being quickly replaced with huffing and puffing and just plain "sick of the stuff." I asked my brother in Philadelphia how much snow they were getting from this latest storm, and he just said, "A lot…."
It’s the old half empty/half full glass. Here in Vermont we welcome each inch of snowfall, worth a million tourist dollars. But New York City complains that a million dollars is how much it costs to remove each inch of snow that falls on its streets.
I have always nurtured a secret pride as a Vermonter in winter. The pride of survival, the pride of the Iditarod. Frankly, the excitement of snow helps get me through the seeming endless months of winter.
White is so much prettier than brown, or the ugly jaded green that is now the color of my hapless backyard – and my envy.
To the winner goes the spoils, or in this case, bragging rights. I’ll have to listen to my family’s reports of snow totals and survival stories. I’ll have to listen to them whine about their hardships.
The problem is, as snow inevitably returns to Vermont, I don’t think I’ll get much sympathy.