Milk & Bread: Snow Days inAiken

South Boundary in the snow. Photo: Tony Gouge

Yes, there is such a thing as winter in Aiken. We grabbed cookie sheets from the kitchen to sled down the slopes of ditches the moment frost appeared on the grass.

We stuck our tongues out to catch the flakes of flurries so small we could barely see them. When we got really, really lucky, we’d roll snowballs big enough to form snowmen, carefully ignoring the brown grass that got rolled up in our masterpieces. 

Aiken was founded as a Winter Colony for people who thought a South Carolina version of the season wasn’t much at all to contend with — no blizzards, no snow cover that lingered until March, rarely anything that would keep you from taking your horse out for a trot. But growing up in Aiken meant taking winter wonderlands wherever you could get them — and moving quickly before it all melted. 

As often as we got enough precipitation to make a snowball with, it seemed we got the promise of something that never arrived. For some reason winter storms would dissipate south of I-20, with Edgefield getting snowflakes and Aiken getting the dreaded “wintry mix.” Sometimes you’d see flurries scurrying around in the air but seemingly disappearing before they hit the ground, which of course was never actually cold enough to freeze like it did up north. I remember sitting in my fifth-grade classroom at Mead Hall, looking out at the playground and silently begging it to snow. I think I stared so hard that my eyes went fuzzy, so that for a moment it looked like it was really happening. (It never did.)

Just the threat of a winter storm was often enough to get the day off from school or work, with no snowplows or salt trucks to keep the roads clear. As a child, it’s so rare to encounter something you’re as excited about as your parents, but the promise of a snow day held that rare allure. We’d buy up all the bread and milk of course — why does every Southerner assume they’re going to spend a  snowstorm making French toast? — and keep an eye on the skies. We’d secretly hope for enough snow for a full week off. 

When those slate-gray skies finally gave way, that’s when the real stories began. My mom describes any snow day as a party day, when the rules of when to make a cocktail or what to serve the kids for dinner went out the window. A basic walk through the neighborhood would become an epic trek, making your way to your friend’s house so you could round them up for a snowball fight or scrape the snow off your boots and come in for hot chocolate — on snow days, marshmallows and chocolate were breakfast foods. Nobody in Aiken really had proper snow gear. Nobody ever seemed to mind. 

Diane Miniard, who you may remember from my story on the Heart Show earlier this year, sent me a picture of the snowman made by her son Jake during a 2005 storm, wearing a fur-lined hat his father had brought back from Moscow. (At least someone in Aiken was prepared for the elements.) I dug through my own photos and found snowy selfies I took with some younger relatives, preschoolers back then who were experiencing their first real snow day. There was one snowfall in the mid-90s where there was enough to blanket the entire Whitney Polo Field. In the pictures, we’re out there with all the neighborhood kids, our not-exactly-waterproof jackets in the bright teals and pinks of the 90s, rolling up the biggest snowballs we’d ever seen. 

1997 Snow day Warren, Kellen & Katey

So that’s what we did with just a few inches of snow, which for my entire childhood was as much as we ever got. But when the Aiken area got a 14-15 inch proper blizzard, it became such an epic event that the newspapers were still writing about it 50 years later. No, literally. In 2023 Dede Biles wrote a story for the Aiken Standard looking back at the 1973 snowstorm that was both a “winter wonderland” and “wreaked havoc” all across the South. 

In The Augusta Chronicle they rounded up even more colorful anecdotes for an anniversary piece in 2016. “My dad was on-call that weekend at University Hospital. He told my mother that he was going to the hospital on the tractor,” Deadra Williams Oliver wrote in. “After the storm a picture appeared in The Augusta Chronicle of that John Deere tractor sitting in the doctors' parking lot alone.”

Transportation mishaps wind up being part of so many snow day stories, hard as the city may try to shut things down and keep everyone off the road. My friend Liz Townsend recalled for me the time when she and her husband tried to drive to Columbia when there was nothing but cold rain in Aiken, only to find it had turned into snow once they hit I-20. (I’m telling you, there really is some kind of weather Rubicon on that highway.) A skid on black ice left them stranded on the side of the road, unharmed but way more aware of the danger of winter roads. Liz, who lived in Connecticut as a child, once rolled her eyes at the Southerners who shut everything down at the first hint of snow. She lives in Atlanta now, having survived several of their own Snowpocalypse sagas, and tells me she’s changed her ways. “I have a little bit of that in my brain— calling into work, like, ‘Hello, it is flurrying, I will not be going into work today.’”

My personal snow day transportation disaster was even more minor, and sums up, for me, the infectious, childlike magic of a snow day in Aiken. I was a senior in high school when we got about 5 inches of snow just after New Year’s, gloriously delaying the dreaded post-holiday return to reality. Some adult neighbors — names will be withheld to protect the guilty — had gotten into the spirit by going out to do donuts in someone’s golf cart. Inevitably, one of these grown men had fallen off, splitting his elbow in the process. 

They shouldn’t have been driving the golf cart in the first place — remember what I said about expanded cocktail hour? — and really shouldn’t be driving anyone to urgent care, so I was recruited to pile everyone into a car and get the victim stitched up. Did some beer cans make their way into the doctor’s office? I’m not at liberty to say. But it was a snow day, so nobody seemed to mind. And the fact that I’m still telling the story more than 20 years later tells you it was worth it.