Charlotte is most flamboyant in fall, most promising in spring, most feverish in summer … and most forgettable in winter.
Camellias aside, about the only signs of growth, of life, during this colorless season are the viruses. They get frisky this time of year, while the rest of us keep our toothbrushes separate. It’s not personal; it’s just, winter.
This weekend, though, our shared community value — watching something start and rooting for it to grow — came in the form of snow. Real snow. No sleet or freezing nonsense. Just fluff we could puff with a leaf blower, and it added up to the biggest storm in 22 years.
“Nothing like a snow day,” my friend Tommy Tomlinson texted yesterday, after I sent him a few pictures of our kids.
Tommy knows. He wrote a snow day story I go back and read every year, “Snow Fell,” a quarter-century ago in the Observer.
My favorite line in that story, which is full of keepers, is, “Cities shrank.”
We need that. The trouble with a typical Charlotte winter isn’t that we can’t do anything, because we can, it’s that it’s just cold and gray enough that we don’t feel like doing anything. But the snow gave us something to participate in, in our own, personal ways.
Yesterday’s storm was special. It produced the fourth-highest snowfall total in a single day in Charlotte history, according to WCNC’s Brad Panovich. It also came at the great expense of our friends in the Triangle, who were somehow caught in a dry spot all day and got maybe a couple of inches. A college buddy in Fuquay sent me two pictures — one of his middle finger with a bare yard in the background, another a meme of Moses parting the North Carolina snow sea.
Still, there on Fayetteville Street in our state capital, a couple got engaged at midnight. Seventy miles east, in Asheboro, which got about nine inches, zebras at the zoo galloped in a rare camouflage. A big pileup on Interstate 85 wasn’t fun, but it was the most exciting thing to happen on that stretch of highway since the new Yadkin River bridge opened in 2013.
Here back home, Optimist photographer Logan Cyrus found his own way around. He walked from east Charlotte into uptown on Sunday morning. Center city was calm and fresh, with the exception of a Destiny’s Child song, which probably came out around the last time we had this much snow in 2004, and morning breaths of bacon.
Following his nose and ears, he wound up at Midnight Diner. It was open. Classic response from a diner that survived being lifted off the ground and moved from South End to Uptown three years ago.
He stopped for two eggs and sausage. And coffee from a pot, the most forgettable and unforgettable kind of warm drink on a cold day.
Here’s more of what he saw on his walkabout:
