Snow for Pesach

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Blizzard Mar 1960

Sarita and siblings – Howard, Marion, Len Pre-Pesach Blizzard, March 1960

Snow on the first day of Spring? My initial reaction was disbelief and outrage. Will winter never end? We never have snow this late in March.

But wait. Maybe we do.

March 29, 1982. Lou and I bought our first home the year before (4 Inness Place in Glen Ridge, in case you’re wondering) and for the second year, we are hosting my family’s seder. There will be 16 of us. We finished cleaning the night before so there is no food in the house (or at least, none that we’ll be able to eat for the next week). The shopping list is made. We’ve got two stops the next day – the butcher and Shoprite.

March 30. We wake up in the morning, look out our window and see … a blizzard! Change in plans. Forget going out for a bagel breakfast. We’ve got to get a move on it and go shopping now.

First stop is the butcher. It takes us twice as long to get there but we make it and hurriedly pick up what we need for the seder – the turkey we have ordered, chicken for soup, a shank bone – as well as a few more items for the rest of the week (chicken for Friday night and chopped meat for the special Pesach meatloaf I make every year). We beat the crowd and are out of there in 15 minutes.

Next stop, Shoprite. It’s only a couple of miles but road conditions are getting treacherous and visibility is poor. It takes what seems like hours to get there. We arrive. A moment of panic. Is it open? Yes, the lights are on. We go inside and the manager greets us. He’s the only one in the store and was just about to close. Please, we beg. We’ll be quick. He says yes.

I race to the Pesach aisle and start grabbing food off the shelf. Lou grabs another shopping cart and races around the store to get the other food items. Fifteen to twenty minutes later we’re ready to check out. We thank the manager profusely and head out the door. Only we don’t see our car, just some big blobby mounds of snow. The snow is coming down so heavily that it has completely covered the few cars in the lot. Which one is ours?

The story ends happily. We find our car. It takes us another forever to get home but we make it. I won’t eat matzah before the first seder so I quickly whip up a batch of Pesach muffins (thus began our now yearly tradition of making Pesach muffins the night before Erev Pesach). Then I start cooking. Sometime during the early evening, the snow stops.

April 1. I finish the cooking. Lou prepares the table and seder plate. The temperature rises. By the time our guests arrive, the snow has melted and you’d never have known there was a blizzard the day before. It was a beautiful seder.

March 2015: I’m a last minute kind of person. Lou is not. He’s been asking me when we’re going to shop for Pesach as soon as he saw the Pesach food come out, a week before Purim. We’ll go to the butcher the day before but we now do the supermarket shopping at least a week ahead of time.

 

 

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