Free You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark Page A

sight of Southerners wading through snow drifts on the nightly news, bundled in layers of clothes.
    The only time Southerners like layers is when they’re in the ruffled tulle of our wedding gowns (or perhaps in the sixteen-layer chocolate cakes our sainted grandmothers used to make). If we wanted snow and cold weather, we would move to someplace like Minnesota, which even native son Garrison Keillor describes as “a state where people’s tongues are routinely frozen to metal objects.”
    Here in the middle of the coldest winter I can remember,
the weather announcer has said that today’s high will be seventeen. I want my mommy.
    The only thing that’s funny about this weather in our South is that it brings out the braggart in all the many thousands of Yankees who have moved here.
    Oh, how they chuckle at our quaint complaints. The ruder ones are openly disdainful of our pouty reactions to this late unpleasantness.
    “You call this cold?” one said to me. “Ha! When we lived in Buffalo, winters were so cold the flashers would stop women and show them a picture of themselves naked.”
    Yes, well, yok, yok, yok. All I know is, this morning, the weatherman said those two words that are like kryptonite to a Southerner: “Black ice.”
    The very name conjures images of church vans overturned on interstates, and sends shivers down our already shivered spines.
    Here is a typical conversation between a Southern mama and her Southern daughter in the event of a prediction of the dreaded black ice from the TV weatherman:
    Mama: “You can’t go out tonight. John Bob on Channel 7 says it’s going to be real bad out there.”
    Daughter: “Oh, Mama, you’re so silly. I’m going out tonight and you can’t stop me. Now stop worrying!”
    Mama ( smiling slightly ): “He said there would be … black ice on the highways.”
    Daughter: “What y’all wanna watch on TV tonight?”

    Northerners are unconcerned about black ice or anything else. To hear them tell it, our new Yankee-transplant neighbors never took their babies out in strollers. They simply balanced them on their feet, March of the Penguins -style, and went about their errands.
    There was no mistaking the braggy tone of a transplant who moved here from North Dakota. He put his dog outside for a few minutes so it could do its business one night and it froze to death in mid poop.
    “Yah, sure, it froze to death right dere, you betcha.”
    Keeping all this in mind, you can just imagine the reaction of these newcomers when our local public schools delayed opening a couple of hours “on account of it being real cold.” Yep, that’s what they said in just those words.
    I didn’t see anything funny about that. It seemed like a perfectly acceptable reaction to me. We Southerners aren’t built to endure cold. We are gentle creatures that look best in sundresses and skin that is dewy with humidity. I will never again complain about a brutal August heat. This morning, it was fifty-nine degrees in my living room and I made coffee while wearing gloves.
    There’s nothing wrong with my heating system. It’s just, like the rest of us, utterly depressed by such ridiculous expectations. Our hands, feet, and faces are chapped, rough, and red. We are sleeping in, may God have mercy on our Southern souls, sweat pants.
    Meanwhile, as far south as Orlando, there were reports
of snow flurries. At Disney World, it was rumored that even Winnie the Pooh was finally contemplating putting on some pants, surely a sign of the end times.
    There is one thing good to have come out of this awful cold snap we’ve experienced: The Snuggie.
    When I opened the birthday gift from my mother-in-law a few months earlier, I had let loose with a snobby little chuckle. That was back in September when we were enjoying our normal 98 percent humidity. Good times.
    “Wow,” I said when I opened the box. Didn’t see that one coming. A Snuggie. As seen on TV. My mother-in-law gave me a blanket with