While Georgia was getting icier than your average "frost free" refrigerator, I was on my way up yonder to the land of concrete - a land also known as New York. New England eventually got a helping of the same storm, but northerners don't share the southern passion for terror in the face of a snow cloud. Give a New Yorker a strong heat wave, and he'll faint and spill his latte all over his Gucci shoes; but blow a few feet of snow up his pants leg, and it's nothing. They don't close their schools, they don't raid the grocery stores, and most don't run to the Bible to see if the good Book of Revelation considers snow in Atlanta as a sign of the end-times. Northerners take snow and ice in stride.

It's interesting to be out of town when something big is going on with Georgia's weather. Minnesotans are fond of asking about our summer heat waves, which is what they call any temperature above 70 degrees. For the record, our highways rarely catch fire, and I don't think anyone has ever been stuck in boiling asphalt on I-285. Plenty of people have been "stuck on I-285," but that's not the same thing, even if they were boiling mad. I do know that Georgia's cold weather was the talk of the town on this trip, and I couldn't get over the fact that I was listening to the news of a Georgia blizzard while walking around in a snow-free New York airport. That's a twisted irony.

Since a Georgia storm of this magnitude is rare, I wasn't going to pass up a chance to brag about how badly we were getting hammered. The three inches of snow on my back deck became two feet of solid ice by the time the story came out of my mouth. I couldn't help a little exaggeration. Besides, as long as you stay under three feet, no one's going to call the governor and check up on your story, And in case you're wondering, the Bible does mention snow but there's nothing about Atlanta... not by name, anyway. But if the end of the world does come around during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure I'd rather spend my precious last minutes in a frozen Georgia than in a snow-free New York airport, even if they offer me all the lattes I can drink.

David McCoy, a notorious storyteller and proud Yellow Jacket, lives in Conyers, can be reached at davmccoy@bellsouth.net.