I withheld comment recently when someone on Facebook posted photos of the “ice storm” that shut down schools and highways in Dallas last month. Others were not so kind.

In fairness, it was a thin but solid sheet of ice that covered everything. The photo didn’t really tell that story and several readers mocked the phrase ice storm.  It really was more of an ice dusting but one person’s storm is another person’s dusting I suppose.

There is a sense of pride or smugness when it comes to telling tales about surviving terrible winter weather.  Bragging about the weather is an unsanctioned sport in coffee shops and office lounges “up north.”.  Most tales start with “It was so cold that….”  They often end with someone else saying “that’s nothing. I remember when…”  Eventually the group nods in approval that the final tale depicts the coldest, longest, or snowiest storm ever.

The title of worst winter storm, according to numerous sources, belongs to the Great Blizzard of 1888.  The storm hit the northeastern states in March 1888. It caused more than $20 million in property damage (about $550 million today) and killed more than 400.  New York City was buried under 22” of snow. Further north, cities were hit with up to 50” of snow in two days.  Wind gusts up to 80 mph buried buildings, horses and people under massive snow drifts.  Now that’s a storm to remember or forget.

There’s a bonding that occurs when several people experience the same storm, even though it may have happened fifty years ago. The really bad storms are etched in people’s memory in much the same way hurricanes and tornadoes mark history for hundreds of years.

Everyone has a good winter storm story. Texans may have felt left out of that conversation until February 2021 when the temperature dropped way down and millions lost power.  Winter storm Uri, as it was named, has the dubious distinction of being the costliest winter storm on record with $196.5 billion in damages.  My memory was more localized as I fought the ice flow in my pool for a week with a large wooden pole.

My personal winter storm brag is surviving the Chicago blizzard of 1982.  A week of snow was followed by extreme low temperatures of -26 degrees on January 10 and high winds that pushed the wind chill to -80 below.  The weatherman didn’t mince words when he said “if you go outside you and your pets might die.” It was good advice.  It was so cold… that ice formed on the inside of some walls of our home.  I should mention that it was a rental.

A temperature of -26 sounds darn cold but residents of Fargo, North Dakota will brag that their grandparents survived -48 degrees in the late 1800’s.  Then again, workers on the Alaskan pipeline recorded a balmy -80 degrees in 1971. Let’s just hope the storm tales are over for this season and we can get onto bragging about the heat.  Did you now that it was so hot in Texas last summer that…

Send comments and your own storm brags to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.