By Jonathan Wright
Well, it looks as if we’re finally finished with snow days for this school year. At least we hope so.
It’s April, the flower bulbs are sprouting and some even blooming, green grass is starting to mix with the pervasive light beige grass, the “peepers” down at the pond have begun their nightly concerts, the warm breezes are blowing—and the snow is all melted.
Of course, it’s still entirely possible that an early spring snow will descend on our mountains sometime this month, but for all intents and purposes spring has arrived. We can finally, finally resume our normal activities without having to think so much of the need to have backup plans in case of hazardous roads.
We’re all painfully aware that Greenbrier County Schools have missed the equivalent of more than a month of classes this winter and will have to go well into June to make some of those days up. Such is the way it goes in a rough winter.
Over in Covington, where I travel to five days per week to teach, schools have been out a whopping 10 days this winter. That’s amazing—way more than I’ve ever witnessed in my eight years of teaching over there.
Covington just doesn’t get much snow for some reason. Just as the Allegheny front tends to squeeze most of the snow and dumps it on the western end of our county before it gets here to the Greenbrier Valley, the mountains along the state line tend to wring out any remaining snow before any of it gets to Covington. I’ve often said that if you don’t like snow, Covington is the place to live.
But this year has been different, with more productive storms coming in from the south, and thus more snow days accrued for the schools there. Fifteen minutes have been added to each school day to prevent having to add too many days to the end of the school year.
Regardless of how much you’ve loved or hated this winter’s weather, I think we’re all glad to be in April now and are quite ready to move on to some warmer, more reasonable weather—at least the kind that doesn’t have to be shoveled off the sidewalks or scraped off the windshield.
Although April and May here in the southern West Virginia mountains are characterized by seemingly endless, up-and-down, yo-yo warm and cold spells, at least we know the worse is behind us at this point.
We’ve paid our dues this winter of 2013-2014. Let the warm breezes blow!