It could have been just another party, even just another Mardi Gras celebration. But Saturday’s gathering of friends and neighbors at Sheila Ford’s urging was more than that.
It was a reunion of sorts of those caught unaware in Snowmageddon 2014.
Ford, unable to go leave town for Mardi Gras because of her children’s school schedule, had looked forward to this night at her home in Alpharetta. Not only would she get to carry on a family tradition but she’d be reunited with good Samaritan Susan Ainsley-Kongthum.
She’d been greeting guests for a full hour when Ainsley-Kongthum appeared at the door.
“So good to see you,” Ford said, throwing her arms open.
"So good to see you," Kongthum answered.
They were among thousands who met by chance during the late January storm that turned metro Atlanta into a massive sheet of ice.
They’d stayed in touch via text but this was the first time they’d seen one another since meeting that fateful evening at the Dunwoody MARTA a station, and it felt good.
“It’s so cool,” Ainsley-Kongthum said. “I feel like I’m seeing a long lost friend again.”
The ice that stopped this city in her tracks left in its wake many new friendships.
Ford and Ainsley-Kongthum’s began Jan. 28 soon after Ford stepped off a Delta Air Lines jet at Hartsfield Jackson International Airport.
It was 1:15 p.m. and snow had already accumulated on metro Atlanta roads and highways. Ford didn’t think much of it until she arrived at the North Springs MARTA Station.
She was waiting to use the rest room when she noticed a girl warming her socks on the heater. The young woman, she learned, had walked to the station. Her feet and the bottom of her pants were soaking wet.
Ford opened her luggage and gave her a pair of socks and a sweatshirt.
“She was ecstatic,” Ford said. “It was like I gave her 500 bucks.”
The young woman soon left the station, but Ford had nowhere to go. Her husband was stuck back in their Alpharetta neighborhood. Maybe he could reach her later when traffic eased, he told her.
Ford backtracked to the Dunwoody station to kill time at Perimeter Mall, only to find it deserted. Now her cell phone was losing power and hotels were booked. Panic set in.
The 50-year-old mother of two left walking, not sure what direction to go.
A few minutes earlier, Ainsley-Kongthum, 41, decided to head to Dunwoody, too. She had already spent four hours in her car and one hour of pacing in the Northside Hospital lobby, where she’d finally sought refuge after getting stuck in gridlock while trying to get home to Sandy Springs.
Just as Ainsley-Kongthum stepped off the train, the two women, weary and worn, came face-to-face. It was shortly after 6 p.m.
“We started talking and she said, ‘Don’t think this is creepy but you can stay with us,’ ” Ford remembered. “We’re normal people.”
“I’m normal, too,” Ford told her. “I’m just scared.”
Soon, Ainsley-Kongthum’s husband, Nate, arrived but couldn’t get his car out of the station parking lot. They decided to walk the 10 minutes to the couple’s Sandy Springs home.
There the Kongthums made Ford a dinner of pasta and spinach. They called friends and family and watched events unfold on television.
Ford invited the couple to the Mardi Gras party she was planning. They snapped a “selfie” and posted it with a short story on their Facebook pages. That’s when they realized they had a common friend.
Glad you found each other, he wrote to them.
Ford knew how lucky she was. She’d found out via text that her neighbors — JoAnn and Kirk Douglass — had slid off the road at 1:30 p.m. and 12 hours later still hadn’t made it home.
“I was so grateful for a warm place to stay, food and a bed for the night. Many people did not get that,” Ford said.
They were up early the next day. The Kongthums made Ford breakfast. When a friend picked her up, the couple joined a group of friends, loaded backpacks with bottles of water, bought dozens of bagels and headed on foot up the Peachtree Dunwoody exit ramp onto I-285.
“It was like a zombie zone,” Ainsley-Kongthum said.
As bad as the previous evening had been, she knew it didn’t compare to being stranded on the highway. The smiles the bagels and water got as they handed them to marooned motorists were proof of that.
At Saturday’s Mardi Gras party, it was Ford and Ainsley-Kongthum doing most of the smiling. It felt good seeing each other again. The storm that brought them together was the talk of the night.
“You two are the folks that took in Sheila, aren’t you?,” people kept asking the Kongthums. “Thank you!”
The couple said they needed no thanks.
“We shared a bond out of fear and desperation,” Ainsley-Kongthun said. “I think we’ll have a long lasting connection.”
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