When my mother, my brother and I moved to Elmira Street in Southwest D.C. in 1994, we were blessed with a decent snowfall in December. After my brother and I built a snowman named Paco, a few of the neighborhood girls saw him and immediately declared war. Let's just say Paco couldn't withstand the fury of the snow fight and neither did one of my soon-to-be best friends--one of the war declarers who got hit in the head by one of my schoolmates with a hard snowball that sent her in the house. (We all laugh about it now, but she wasn't laughing then. Come to think about it, she doesn't really laugh that much now. Maybe the rest of us just laugh at her.) Fast forward three years later to college and that signaled the end of my love affair with snow. Being in upstate New York where they get snow like Seattle gets rain, they couldn't care less about three feet of snow on the ground; you just better have your butt in class because the professor that lived in nearby Ithaca was going to expand your mind through rain, hail, sleet or snow and make it before the end of that 15-minute grace period. Heck, there was snow on the ground two weeks before my graduation in mid-May of 2001. You grow up and you realize that you don't get to be the teenage kid defending the honor of your pitiful looking snowman anymore. Unfortunately, you have to be the responsible adult who has to lace up his Tims, walk 15-20 minutes to get on the subway and trek to work because you live the second closest out of everyone designated as emergency staff. You get to watch the neighborhood kids sled down hills and snow embankments and play with shovels while you're actually using every muscle in your body with yours while A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, Royce Da 5'9" and DJ Premier's PRyhme or Freddie Gibbs' Shadow of a Doubt albums are just about the only things helping you to ignore slowly losing the feeling in your fingers and toes. Add insult to injury: you live in a region where schools close if it rains hard enough--except in D.C.--so imagine being told that a snowstorm of historic proportions is on the horizon. Thus, as we deal dig out of the aftermath from Winter Storm Jonas (someone in one of my Facebook said that she didn't realize that they gave names to winter storms), allow me to trudge through five reasons why winter weather in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area bothers every piece and portion of my existence...
