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In January, winter really gets down to business. Just ask any of us here on the east coast, from Florida to Maine, who endured last week’s vicious attack of ice, snow and obscenely cold temperatures. We are just now emerging from our dens with a shaky confidence that life above ground will go on.

Listening to NPR, I learned that we were the victims of a Bombogenesis, an apocalyptic- sounding, meteorological term for when the barometric pressure drops steeply in a short period of time and so creates a “bomb cyclone.” Indeed it felt like a bomb, disrupting life wherever it hit.

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Now, everyone experiences a bombogenesis in her or his own way. As for me, icy roads are my kryptonite. I feel a sudden onset of paralysis and can’t leave home. Apparently, so too, do most Southerners. At the mere threat of inclement weather schools close before the first snowflake falls, sometimes as early as a day before. This same rationale grounded garbage trucks from their rounds last week, prohibited the mail from delivery, and left many businesses shuttered early.

To non southerners this behavior may seem paranoid, ridiculous and downright silly but I think it’s actually pretty ingenious. Southerners just know how to nuance a snowstorm better than anyone else. We have an unspoken but tacit agreement amongst ourselves that it’s okay to cancel all sorts of activities using the weather as an excuse to play hooky, and not just from school. There is a collective sigh of relief when the team practice, the

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book club, and the church committee meeting are all suspended until further notice too.

Because modern life is a sea of constant activity, we adults long for a chance to stop and rest. An opportunity to come in from the cold, to acknowledge and respond to our primitive instinct to hibernate in winter. Forecasts of snow and ice provide an excuse to stay home, to withdraw from the outside world and to draw near to the warmth of our own hearth. Witness the people all rushing to the grocery store to buy not only the obligatory bread and milk, but the hot chocolate, the wine, the popcorn. We are all planning and hoping to be captives in our respective dens and we want the larder well stocked.

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And, if only for a few brief days, we want to enjoy the satisfaction that comes from a good excuse to cancel school and other obligations and just stay home and sit by the fire.