It’s not as if we didn’t know long in advance that a big snowstorm was heading our way.

After all, the weather people had been talking about it nonstop for a couple of days. The TV was filled with dramatic news footage of the season’s first major snowstorm as it clobbered cities throughout the mid-Atlantic region and swept northward.

It was no secret that it would hit Maine on Saturday, and, as a result, that we all might want to give some thought to what the driving conditions would be like if were we to venture out into the mess.

And yet when the storm arrived, right on schedule, there appeared to be a portion of the driving population that was caught completely off-guard, no matter what signals were thrown in their paths.

It was as if the storm, coming as it did a couple of weeks before the official start of winter, couldn’t possibly be dumping a large amount of real snow that might require them to actually change the way they navigated their cars through the streets. The snow that blanketed the landscape should have triggered something in the deep recesses of the brain to remind them that their cars would not perform quite the same way during the storm as they had the day before, when the roads were bare.

If nothing else, the Christmas music playing on the radio and those people skiing down the middle of the streets should have been dead giveaways that the slippery season was indeed upon us.

Living near an intersection, I get to witness this odd phenomenon every year when the first big storm descends. It’s a form of seasonal amnesia that, for some people, erases all recollection of the safe-driving techniques that got them through the previous winter in one piece. Each year, it seems, certain people are forced to learn all over again everything they once knew about driving in bad weather.

The drivers who hurtled down my street toward the stop sign looked to be people who had seen more than a few Maine winters in their lives. They probably had driven in similarly hazardous conditions plenty of times – perhaps even last winter, I’d guess. Yet as they rapidly approached the stop sign, it was obvious that while their eyes saw a blizzard, their brains registered a mild October day.

Hitting their brakes just a few feet before the stop sign, they sailed right through the intersection, wearing befuddled expressions that seemed to say, “What the heck is going on here?”

I saw evidence of the curious affliction everywhere I went over the snowy weekend. There were people who carelessly darted out of side streets directly into the paths of cars, people who zoomed past city plow trucks, and people who raced up to red lights and then skidded through them sideways.

There were those who insisted on going 70 on the highway, oblivious to the large yellow sign that screamed “45,” and people who managed to forget in just a few short months since the last storm of spring that pressing the accelerator to the floor is actually the least effective method of bringing a car out of a skid or getting it up a slippery hill.

If experience really is the best teacher, there certainly are an awful lot of slow learners out there.