It is Friday night, March 11 and I am somewhat stuck in a memory loop as I write this, thinking back 29 years to a birthday weekend that turned into one of the worst natural disasters I have experienced in my lifetime, but hasn’t been the last.
I’ve lived through plenty of storms – tropical and tornadic in nature – but nothing in my life was like the Blizzard of 1993.
Let’s start from the beginning, because my mom reminded me of all that was going on at the time during a conversation earlier this afternoon. She for instance, recalled (and I didn’t) that my Grandma Eleanor was visiting and left the morning the storm was set to hit, and boy did it.
“I told her she better get out of here before she got stuck with us,” Mom remembered on the phone. Then asked a pertinent question: “Could you have imagined what it would have been like if she were stuck with us in the blizzard with THE PIG TOO?”
I could imagine it being a disaster beyond what we experienced that weekend.
Let’s however, start from the beginning of my particular memories from the weekend:
Friday, March 12, 1993
I remember the day started warm, and that I went to school in at least a short-sleeved shirt. I dribbled and shot basketball early in the morning on the goal my parents put up for me at the end of the driveway.
I was in second grade, and my classroom was in a trailer. Sometime just before lunch, an announcement was made that school was closing early and students would be going home due to the weather. Weather? I didn’t know anything much about it at the time that I can remember.
I’m sure that I had watched the news early in the morning with my mom – Good Morning America came on right after – and I must have said goodbyes to Grandma at some point, but I guess I didn’t put things together at the time. I was too excited about my birthday.
(In some fairness too, my memory was more impressed upon what came after all this.)
Mom also reminded me that the storm didn’t start with snow. There was rain and thunder and a nasty amount of wind. Trees snapping kind of wind. As the night wore on, it got colder and at some point, the power went out. I remember it was already dark, and my dad built a fire. Everyone cuddled up for the night.
It is also important to note at this point that when I was a kid, we didn’t have a pet dog. Beauregard was a pet pot-bellied pig my father had bought a year or two earlier after our move to Ringgold from East Ridge, when my parents bought the Brownwood house.
Somewhere around my mess of a collection of notes and memories is a copy of Pot Bellied Pig magazine with Beauregard on the cover. I’ll find it at some point…
Pigs, as you might or might not know, are damn smart animals. Beauregard was especially a master of escaping from places he didn’t want to be, and he would gladly go running down the road to neighbor’s homes and enjoy being fed Cheezits – or in one case, drinking small amounts of beer from a dog bowl when he raided a party down the street from our house.
Noteworthy about the pig as well is that they are animals that prefer to be warm, and to nest. Beauregard usually lived in the basement, first inside a makeshift pigpen my dad created out of a cardboard log cabin we got for Christmas a few years prior to the pig joining the family. When he was large enough to realize he could lift the entire structure with just his snout and get out, the log cabin was taken down and the basement became his territory.
Beauregard’s nest lived under my dad’s drafting table, a ripped tangle of old blankets and a quilt that became his comfortable bed throughout the year – with the exception of a few hours during the first night of the snowstorm moving in.
Our pig briefly joined us upstairs in front of the fireplace in an attempt for everyone to stay warm together, the idea being that we would all cuddle up under blankets and sleeping bags with pillows on the floor in front of the only source of warmth in the house in the living room.
This was fine, until Beauregard sometime during the night – I’m guessing maybe an hour after we were all snuggled up for bed, without television to keep us up it was likely around 9-ish. Beauregard placed himself as close to the open fire as he could get without crawling in, and before long the pig was being shooed away from the flames for fear he might be trying to roast himself. The only thing missing from the scene in my memory is an apple in Beauregard’s mouth as he splayed himself across the hearth.
(The brick, if memory serves me well, wasn’t exactly comfortable to sit on during normal times. I can’t imagine how it was for a pig when the fire was red hot keeping us all warm….)
Beauregard’s stay upstairs for the night ended after that, and he wasn’t seen much for the rest of the weekend as he kept under his blankets in the basement. We checked on him regularly, but we quickly learned pig and fire should be kept separate.
Saturday, March 13, 1993
By this point it was clear my original birthday plans for a bowling party were off for Saturday, and I would be celebrating the start of my 8th year on planet earth snowed in by this epic Blizzard of 1993. The winds were whipping, the snow piled up and the cold refrigerated items ended up in drifts on the porch. Every inch of pavement and concrete had a layer of ice over it.
Dad during the storm had to go out and chop firewood in the back yard, probably in my mind the scariest time during the entire event but in the hindsight of memory seems a major annoyance more than a real danger. He could have gotten out of the cold at anytime for a while and finished up the work.
I’ll add that I don’t remember much about what I did Saturday, beyond going into my room bundled up and playing with Legos and Micro Machines while it was still light out. The small cars and vehicles of all types were my favorite toy at the time.
Such is the state of my memories at the time: colored by nostalgia for certain items and times, but having pushed out the fluff from regular consciousness to account for all the crap that goes through my brain on a regular basis.
I’m sure we ate food cooked over the fire or the charcoal grill we had on the deck, moved below it to keep from being snowed on while we cooked. I’m sure Beauregard at some point got out of his nest to use the bathroom. I’ll even put good money on the likelihood that we used our sleeping bags to slide down the stairs to the basement from the living room to entertain ourselves.
Do I know that these things happened for absolute, swear-on-bible fact? No, your honors. I can’t do so anymore. Those things have been pushed outward for the time being. Maybe it will come back to me in years forthcoming.
Sunday, March 14, 1993
Here’s what sticks out about my birthday, however: the wind and snow had ended, and I woke up on my birthday to a frozen wasteland of white and some cool presents to open in front of the fire. I got a bean bag chair that year, more micro machines, and if I remember correctly – that was the year I got a Nerf football I threw to myself in the yard later in the spring and fall, imaging myself running for a touchdown in front of Auburn fans at Jordan Hare.
Here’s where the real fun began for me after waking up and eating something we cooked on the fire in the fireplace for my birthday breakfast. I was sent forth as the messenger to neighbors down the road to determine the plans for what to do next.
(I also might not have the entirely best memory of the back and forth of this, but I do remember being sent outward. Maybe I had too much 8-year-old energy or something, and everyone had enough of me. That could be fair. But why I went out, I’m not entirely sure? Shrugs.)
I was wrapped up against the cold and sent outward to go get a report on the situation down the road, this being a time without cell service and the regular telephone lines were down. Find out what is happening at the Scarborough house, sometime around 11ish. Come back and report in.
We lived in a hilly neighborhood, and the one I had to go down was either covered in ice or snow. I remember going down the hill through yards and trying hard not to slip and fall all over the place, but made it to the friends house without a problem.
They were boiling hot dogs on their kerosene heaters and had a gas water heater, so had hot showers. I remember too I trudged back up – I think after being fed – and reported they had heat and hot water, so we all went back down to their house for a few hours.
Before nightfall, the power was back on and we marched back home in the snow. School was called off for the Monday and Tuesday following as things thawed out. The world carried on as before.
I did ultimately celebrate my birthday (correct me if I’m wrong, Mom, but was it in April?) and I did get to bowl with my friends.
But since then, I have noted that several unusual and/or bad events have occurred on my birthday. For instance: a bridge collapsed during my birthday weekend some four years later. Fukushima occurred around the weekend of my birthday as well in 2011. Most recently, the world shut down on March 13, 2020 because of COVID-19.
Does this mean that this year’s snowstorm heading toward Polk County mark another disaster in store for all of us because of a recurring pattern around my birthday, or is this all purely coincidence? Likely the latter, but that nagging selfish side of me wonders if maybe my birthday is cursed.
With all that I’ve been through in the past, I’ll say that I don’t like it when bad things happen. And most years, Pi Day passes without much in the way of positive or negative feelings. Birthdays come and go, just like any other day of the year after a certain point when all the milestones are surpassed.
But the ones that I remember? It usually involves something like a snowstorm.
Guess we’ll see what happens by Monday.
-KtE
If you liked this item, you might also want to read “Snow Storm,” a short story I penned several years back. It is only available to subscribers however, so consider joining for $5 a month. It helps support free local news at Polktoday.com and Pauldingtoday.com when you join.
Comments