Last Sunday the word went out: Y’all! It’s gonna snow, day after tomorrow!

I’m just about as deep south as you can possibly get with this news, in the swampy state of Louisiana and boy, did these folks freak out! Monday’s high was to be 40 degrees and Wednesday would be back up to 37, but Tuesday was projected to drop all the way down to 26 degrees with a 90% chance of precipitation.

This news was plopped on the same folks who endure 100-plus degree weather all summer long, so I am not saying anything disdainful about them in their winter-snow terror, but my friend and I went out for our weekly shopping trip, and that grocery store was wrapped with cars in the main parking lot, the side lot, the extended lot and on the grass around back. Every time I tried to call my boss at the Jazz Fest, she was out shopping, “getting ready for the freeze.” Sunday was a long trip to Trader Joe’s and Monday she was back at it again, making sure she had enough food to endure the two-day shut-in.

The grocery stores were completely sold out by Monday afternoon. While looking for bread, I talked to another shopper who told me, “Give me a hurricane any day! You can get out the way of those, but snow? You stuck with that!” I asked why that was, but he couldn’t explain it. “You just is!” as if it were common knowledge, which, down here, it seems to be.

Back in the 1990s, when I still lived here, I remember it snowing an inch or so, and running into two young men, bedazzled at what they were seeing. “Dude, check it out,” one of them cried to the other as he grinned over his shoulder at his tracks in the snow, “You can see where you was!”

I’d never considered that before.

And then came Tuesday. New Orleans got 10 inches of snow, a record unmatched since 1895. Indeed, a snowfall like this one is rarer than a hurricane is to western Massachusetts.

You’d think that after living 20 years (this year) in Ashfield I’d be a little used to snow by now, but I now quite humbly know that there is a 1,500-mile physical as well as cultural difference between Nor’east snow and whatever that was we got here. The snow that fell in New Orleans from 6 a.m. Tuesday morning until 5 p.m. that afternoon was manufactured in a shredder; flakes so exaggerated that they looked like what I as a designer would create to bombard the stage set of “A Christmas Carol” so that the flakes could be seen from the audience.

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And the cold; not rational Massachusetts cold, but a deep, piercing wetness that blew through all my layers. Seven layers are merely laughed at by that seeping, humid New Orleans cold. “Watch this!” it sneers, and turns a fan on to blow that wet dank through everything you know to wear.

In New Orleans, there are no hills, so that sledding demands creativity and minimal frontal-lobe development. Stepping out for my walk, I ran into a group of Tulane University students who had devised their winter sleigh ride out of an upside-down folding table tied with a 10-foot rope to the back of a vehicle. Five young men rotated their stations — four of them rode in the vehicle while the fifth crouched inside the table, zooming through the icy city streets at 20 miles an hour.

“Y’all be careful,” I warned when I saw the plan forming, but they wondered what in the world could go wrong in a southern city where people disrespect the rules of the road on a 90-degree day, and have no idea what to do with spinning tires on 2 inches of ice — while dragging a table with a guy inside it.

Two hours later I got a screeching message on my phone, the kind that warns of imminent disaster, begging people to stop driving, as crashes were overwhelming first responders. The five sledders, I saw later, made it home safely.

Record-breaking snow, New Orleans got on Tuesday. By evening, no snow had been removed from the streets despite the city having hired a plow company from Indiana to come and do what they don’t have the equipment for here. A state of emergency was called, and the shutdown extended through Thursday as schools, grocery stores, major roads, bridges, garbage service and public transportation, including ferries, were shut down due to the “hard freeze” that’s now settling in.

In New Orleans, give ’em a hurricane any day. At least you can get away from that.

Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.