This Just In – Winter weather brings some epic memories.
Thinking it might be a little too much caution for schools and businesses to close in anticipation of a January rainstorm, I stepped out onto my front porch at around 4:30 pm with my brother to bring some stuff to his car.
I should have checked the sky for a Kansas house and a green witch. This was amazing in its sudden onset and severity. Warm temps, pounding rain and trees moving around in such a way … how are they still in the ground today?
Dave got to his car and home ok, but this was not certain.
In January of 1982, I got a letter from my aunt, who lived in sunny Arizona. She knew my due date with my first child was approaching and gave me some good advice about knowing when the big day would come. “Watch the weather,” she said. “When you see a giant storm tracking west to east that will dump snow and ice on you (making it difficult to get to the hospital), that’s when the baby will arrive.”
Brian was due on January 20th, but the contractions began the week before. He was my first, so this brought a couple of false alarm dashes to the doctor’s office – a typical experience. When they’re five minutes apart for more than an hour, go to the hospital, they told me.
If you’re old enough, you might remember the day and evening of January 13, 1982. That was the day that, due to a gigantic snow/ice storm that dumped wintery precipitation across the country, Florida Air Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street bridge in Washington and plunged into the Potomac River.
I had been having contractions, off and on, all day. In the evening, I was watching the news coverage of the rescue efforts. It was heartbreaking. Because it was snowing here as well, the idea of letting half a foot of snow get to the North Carolina roads before travelling to the hospital wasn’t very appealing, so we called our doc.
He suggested we might ask the police to drive us to the hospital, but Rick overruled that, citing the rear wheel drive of Durham’s police cars and inexperience in snowy road driving. He liked our chances of getting to the hospital safely in our front-wheel drive car with an experienced Yankee at the wheel. Okay, said the doc, but bring blankets, take heavily travelled roads and remember your emergency childbirth training.
Off we went, arriving just in time to be tucked in for the night in the Durham County Hospital labor and delivery ward. A gurney for me. A chair for Rick (welcome to fatherhood).
My doc rolled in between 8:30-9:00 am, broke my water and announced that we were having a baby that day. I’ll skip the messy parts of this story, but of course, the fun part is that we indeed became parents that day as our perfect seven-pound baby boy arrived at 3:37 pm. A short time later, we called Rick’s parents with our news. Rick gave me the phone and my mother-in-law said something to me that was nothing less than transformative to my 23-year-old ears. “Hi, is this Brian’s mom?” she said.
Somehow, incredibly, the answer was (and is) yes. Yes, I am Brian’s mom. Now he’s a dad, with both children delivered in that same hospital and with similar calls made from hospital rooms just a couple of doors away from where I was on that snowy January day.
In ’82 we looked out the window facing Roxboro Road and saw about a foot of snow – an unspoiled white blanket. We knew then that this boy would always love a wintery day … would love it on the cellular level. Indeed so. Just ask his older son – Winter.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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