When I was young, winter meant cold. Cold, cold and more cold, punctuated by the occasional avalanche of snow. When you spend six years in Kansas and another three in Missouri, these are the sort of memories that winter brings.

Down here in the New South, where I now make my residence, winter means cool breezes and rain, punctuated by the occasional ice storm. Oh, sure, we got 20 inches of snow three years ago, but that was unusual. In fact, it was a record.

Last Thursday, Friday's forecast called for temperatures around freezing and "a light dusting" of snow, or, if you want to get technical, "snow flurries." We didn't get flurries. We got real snow. Two whole inches of it. Barely enough for my son Max and me to build his first snowman, but snow nonetheless.

To me, the difference between "flurries" and "two inches" is mostly semantic. In my experience, flurries often bring an inch or two of snow. In fact, during the one winter I spent in Battle Creek, the nightly westerly breeze brought flurries of lake-effect snow that amounted to about one inch a night.

But to people here in the New South, the difference is stark. "Flurries" means possibly seeing a snowflake or two before they melt immediately upon impact. "Two inches" means abject panic.

I'm not making this up. The snow Friday apparently caused dozens of car accidents, and local schools either closed for the day or let out early. The trash and recycling trucks quit picking up refuse sometime Friday morning. Am I not taking the threat of snow--any snow--seriously, or did folks overreact just a bit?

Maybe both. For starters, the local governments do not have much in the way of snowplows, though they are able to use some trucks as sand and salt-spreaders. So it follows that even a small amount of snow might be able to paralyze the area. Also, it goes without saying that locals don't know how to drive on either snow or ice. Worse, the road conditions here aren't what us converted Yankees are used to dealing with, and so we tend to underestimate the danger. Boom boom crash crash.

But all the bridges and main roads got sand and ice. And the temperatures stayed above freezing, warm enough to cause our snowman to collapse later in the afternoon. I drove many places on Friday and had no difficulty. None at all. I'm sure there were some icy spots Friday night, but nothing during the day that should have caused all the accidents that did happen.

The lead story in the papers on Saturday? To my astonishment, everyone wanted to know why the forecasters had "blown" their snow estimates. Blown? It's not like it snowed much at all. The roads have been clear since Friday afternoon, and most of the white stuff on the ground melted away as well.

Even if it might conceivably be correct to call the forecast of "a light dusting" a mistake, why all the outrage? From the quotes in the newspaper, this was nothing short of a public safety nightmare. Some guy walking down the street picking people off with an AK-47 is a public safety nightmare. An extra inch or two of snow is, well, an extra inch or two of snow.

There rose the cry, "Our kids are in danger!" Though this kind of attitude leads kids around here to expect multiple days off if there is but one flake of snow on the ground. The "blizzard" of 2001 caused local schools to let out for more than a week, even though most of the streets were clear after three or four days. Okay, so the powers that be never plowed my street. No one ever plows or salts my street. It's two blocks long, and it's close to downtown. We're not rich people (well, most of us aren't) and we aren't the sorts who whine when there's some snow on the ground. Rather, we throw snowballs and go sledding.

There's a nice cartoon at the back of the current New Yorker which illustrates the difference between the pessimist and the paranoid using the old "is the glass half-empty or half-full" conundrum. Methinks a few folks here succumbed to some serious snow-dread. Yeah, this is supposedly the South. And yeah, it doesn't snow much. But this is the fifth winter I've been here, and even in the warm ones (which this one isn't) we got some snow. Alright, so generally we have to deal with snow about one week out of the year. That should be often enough to forestall this kind of hysteria, don't you think?

Maybe we just conditioned to overreactions. After all, a good chunk of the locals thought the Apocalypse was upon us after the University of North Carolina's women's soccer team failed to win the NCAA championship in either 2001 or 2002--the first two-year gap in trophies for the team. I guess the antichrist hasn't quite readied his forces, though, since the Tar Heels flattened all comers in 2003, not allowing a goal during the entire tournament.

Tomorrow the temperature will rise into the 50s. All the snow will melt. And the whole "light dusting" controversy will subside. Then we can get back to more urgent matters, like planning funerals for all the N.C. soldiers who keep coming back in flag-covered coffins. Now there's a reason for real concern.

Jon Worley spent much more time making snow soccer balls for Max than he did building a snowman.