Last week was one for the history books in Liberty County.

The predicted snow event was something we haven’t seen the likes of in a long time, and maybe won’t again in our lifetimes.

It’s not just that snow is rare here – it’s been, what, seven years since the last snowfall? – it’s also never stuck around quite like this. And it’s rare that there has been this much.

Even on Tuesday, there were some patches of snow still around, particularly in those areas that are in the shade all day long. Alas, it won’t last much longer though, as the temperature pushes it way back up. I hope the kids got a chance to enjoy the rare couple of inches of snow. Ordinarily, when it does snow here, it’s a dusting and it’s gone in a matter of hours. But not this time.

For adults, driving in the snow and then the refrozen over and over ice is not much fun. I’ve been fortunate to have lived and worked in the South throughout my career. My siblings spent some formative years in Boston before the U.S. Army thought it would be a good idea to send my dad, mom and then brothers and sisters to Georgia more than 60 years ago.

The last time I had to drive in snow and ice, I was working in North Carolina. The town was called Rocky Mount and before you ask “how was it in the mountains?”, frankly, Rocky Mount is nowhere near the mountains. It’s right off I-95. It’s climate is a lot like southeast Georgia’s.

But one particular winter evening, the forecasters called for 2 to 4 inches of snow that night. I lived about 45 minutes from the paper, so I decided to take the longer route home, over more heavily traveled and used roads. Somewhere around midnight on U.S. 64, there was enough light from the streetlights reflecting off the falling snow that I could read the newspaper sitting next to me in the cab of my pickup. And not long later, there was enough snow that my truck just had nowhere else to go.

That 2 to 4 inches? Take out the to. It was not 2, nor was it 4. It was 24 inches. So somewhere on U.S. 1 my truck couldn’t stay on the road and I wound up smack into a big ol’ snowbank. I had the good fortune to do that in front of a convenience store, though it was closed. Its pay phone (remember those?) was still in operation, and I used that to call for a tow.

Even the tow truck that bailed me out had to go all the way down the hill and back up to gain enough momentum. Spent the remainder of the evening at a hotel a few miles up the road and didn’t even make it back to the house in the morning – my roommate met me on the side of the highway and said, “we need to go to the grocery store.”

I spent the next couple of weeks driving back and forth on what seemed to arctic ice floes and not highway at night, packs of snow and ice that slowly melted during the day and refroze once I got done with my section at the paper.

That and Hurricane Floyd made me think God did not want me in North Carolina, so I moved back to Georgia a few months later.

I have feint memories of a snow when I was about 6 or 7 hitting Fort Stewart. We even got the sled out. I think that was the only time in 12 years on post the sled was put to use.

When the old man’s time in the Army was coming to an end, I was convinced we were moving back to Boston. All I had ever known in my single decade of life at that point was Fort Stewart as a home. We visited Boston, and my grandparents at their Canadian outpost, in the summer.

Of the many reasons he did not want to go back to Boston on a permanent basis, the weather was one of them. The old man wanted none of that snow and ice for weeks on end.

As for my grandparents, they eventually moved south when the Canadian winters got too much for them. So they moved back to Massachusetts. Then they started the snowbird cycle, spending a few weeks of winter in Georgia with us before heading back home. At least by then there was no more digging a tunnel through the multiple feet of snow from the house to the outhouse so my grandmother could use the bathroom.

So, snow is pretty to look at. You can have living in it.

Oh, and one of our designers at Rocky Mount? She asked where I came from. I said, well, it’s a small town in Georgia. Called Hinesville.

She knew it. She and her husband lived in a trailer right outside the back gate when he was stationed at Stewart.

Once again, Hinesville will find you. No matter where you go. Or how much it snows.