The local weather persons all seem to be in agreement that tonight we will be getting freezing rain or sleet which will leave a treacherous coating of ice on the roads. If all goes as predicted it will warm up into the 40s by tomorrow afternoon so that should be ok. Meanwhile be careful out there.
In the olden days, when I was a child, this would almost certainly mean that school would be cancelled for tomorrow. The superintendent or some other person in a position to make such decisions would drive around the country roads about 4:00am and decide that, yes indeed, the roads are icy and we must cancel school. School buses are expensive things to repair or replace. Expecting this, my family would turn on the little kitchen radio and we would wait until after the farm news to hear if our school was cancelled. There was always a long list of schools to listen through, because WOWO, our radio station, covered a lot of territory. Since my mother was a teacher for most of these years, she was just as anxious as we kids were to hear if we got a day off. A day off was a wonderous treat. Especially if I had a good book I wanted to finish. One memorable winter we had had lots of rain that fell and pooled on the frozen field across the road from our house. The rain froze into a solid sheet of ice about as large as the Coliseum floor where we sometimes went ice skating, but with a rougher surface because it was wind blown as it froze. That frozen field was our playground for days. I remember skating so much that one night, lying in bed, I could feel the bottoms of my feet vibrating from all the skating.
Those were the good old days. If tomorrow our local schools are closed, the children will not have a day off, nor will the teachers. Instead they will have an e-learning day. Sometimes modern technology just takes all the fun out of life.
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