In Southeast Virginia, there’s no such thing as “only” three or four inches of snow.

As any Suffolk parent can attest by now, “just a little” snow is just enough to empty supermarket shelves, cause havoc on the roads and close schools for days at a time. Even as most of the city’s primary streets were clear and dry on Monday, there were still patches of ice and slush on some of Suffolk’s narrow secondary roads, and you can be sure that students around the area cheered when they heard the news that they would get one more day out of school — and an exam day for many of them, at that. Their parents, on the other hand….

But, as with nearly everything in life, things could have been worse, and in much of Virginia, they were. While Suffolk was wondering whether the sleet and freezing rain would ever give way to soft snowflakes, most of the commonwealth was wondering if those snowflakes would ever stop coming.

Whereas we got three or four inches of fluff, along with miserable amounts of every other kind of winter precipitation, parts of the state were blanketed (and not warmly) with 30 inches or more.

That’s great if you’re at a ski resort or if you’re a “prepper” with enough milk and bread to make all the milk sandwiches your heart desires while feeding the fireplace from a sheltered and stocked woodpile on your porch.

But if you’re not a mountaintop hermit, that kind of snowfall brings a whole load of problems most folks in Suffolk are probably glad to have avoided. Sure, it makes for a great story to tell the grandchildren one day, but they’ll get tired of listening before you ever get to the good part.

Winter is, of course, nowhere near over, and one never knows what to expect from the weather in Southeast Virginia, so it’s probably best not to share mocking Facebook posts of clear roads and clean decks with all your friends in Northern Virginia.

Just sit back and be glad that we (mostly) got missed by this particular storm, this particular time. And that the kids are going back to school.