There's Winter, and Then There's Winter
Two Experiences of Our Family
Those who make Baton Rouge, Louisiana their home can honestly say that their fair city can't reasonably be considered the Snowflake Capital of America. As you know, they get a dusting once every eight to ten years and that generally amounts to 0.5 to 1.0 inches of the white stuff - strictly on a Here-Today-Gone-Tomorrow basis. Their snowmen are true-blue, fly-by-nighters and thankfully Fort Polk doesn't depend on an arsenal of snowballs for their cannons.
Things are a bit different 1,580 miles to the north at a place called Winnipeg (a.k.a., "Winterpeg") in central Canada. If Mother Nature is a bit skimpy with her Baton Rouge snow ration, she is excessively generous with Winnipeg's. Up there they get an average of around 45 inches (nearly four feet) each and every year. It begins to arrive sometime in December and doesn't start to disappear until four months later. During that time it keeps piling up and, just before winter finally draws to a close, voilà - four feet of the stuff.
There lives in Winnipeg a transplanted Acadian (sort of like our forebears). The bold print on his birth certificate reads "Leo Pettipas," and he is proud member of our Circle of Distinction . Leo and local hero Martin Guidry keep in contact through the miracle of email, and late last year for no apparent reason they started comparing notes on Baton Rouge and Winnipeg winters.
Martin told Leo that his daughter Renee holds court with the Pre-Kindergarten class at Behavioral Intervention Group School in Baton Rouge. Last year she ordered in a ton of local man-made snow as a special treat for the kids. The good news is the children had a ball playing with it until it magically vanished. The bad news is the happy episode was a tad pricey and will not be repeated.
When Leo learned that Renee paid money for the snow, he was gob-smacked - in Winnipeg NO ONE would pay a red cent for ANY amount of snow, for ANY reason. The closest Winnipeggers come to that is the $1,000,000 they spend annually to clear it off the streets and parking lots, pile it up off to the side, and haul a whole lot of it away to a mountainous dump.
Being an understanding fellow, however, Leo was quick to appreciate that snow is a welcome novelty in Louisiana, especially for the kids. Not only is he understanding, he's also compassionate. Faced with the prospect of Renee's students not having any this winter, Leo got a brainstorm (read "blizzard"). Transporting a ton of snow from Winnipeg to Baton Rouge in refrigerated trucks is prohibitively expensive, so he had his wife take a picture of him standing next to a typical Winnipeg snow pile that the kids could affix to a classroom wall. Wouldn't that be nice as they enjoyed the snow scene?
Alas, no - the budding scholars thought the idea to be a bit … well … academic. You can't have snow fights with your chums, make snowmen outside or even eat a delicious snow cone with syrup with only a picture to work.