With the solstice only a couple of days away, we are just now getting our first taste of winter. The ice storm last week that knocked out power all over some parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine was only just rain for us, albeit enough rain that the sump pump had to be put into action. We got probably two inches of snow on Wednesday, which might be a disaster in Dallas or Las Vegas, but isn’t even worth calling snow in my vocabulary. Today, however, the panic-mongering TV weather guys have promised us six to ten inches of snow…I’m guessing that’s about the closest to six-to-ten-inches these guys ever get, if you take my meaning (nudge nudge).
Because everybody had a good day or more to think about it, there was a calmness to things this morning. The grocery stores had already been pillaged for every last loaf of bread or quart of milk, the gas stations’ tanks drained dry. It was an automatic excuse to blow off work the Friday before Christmas, getting an early jump on the two least productive weeks in America. Our school department pre-emptively decided to release kids at lunchtime, but when I dropped off Charlotte at school there were a ton of people calling in to say their kids were just plain getting a hookey day. By the time I went back to pick her up, the anticipation of the storm was palpable.
Six to ten inches of snow in a single storm is a decent amount, but it is by no means what I would consider a big deal. We’ll all get up in the morning, plow out our driveways, and get on with things. The people who still don’t have their power back from last week’s storm are probably going to have a sucktastic weekend, and I’m glad I’m not among them, but otherwise it’s a yawner. In the years when it seems like we get a six-to-ten-inch storm once a week, the cumulative result certainly does wear on one’s patience, but even that is not out of the ordinary in this quadrant of the country.
The likelihood of a white Christmas has increased substantially, although last year we had a snowstorm of this caliber in the first half of December and still managed to have completely bare ground on Christmas morning. It was, after all, 60 degrees out just four days ago. Six inches of snow melts pretty quick when the temperature bounces up by thirty degrees overnight.
Charlotte and I just finished reading yet another one of the books in the “Little House” series, “The Long Winter”. The title gives away the premise. It’s about the first winter the Ingalls family spent in the Dakota territory — seven solid months of nearly continuous blizzard conditions buried the little town that had popped up near the new railroad, preventing supply trains from delivering any food or fuel to the few dozen settlers, who had not had time yet to grow and put up food crops and were completely reliant on the trains. The Ingalls wintered in a single room, forced after a while to resort to burning bundles of hay for heat when the coal and kersoene ran out, and limited to a diet of coarse bread made by grinding wheat in a coffee mill. Compared to the other books we’ve read so far, most of which are full of depictions of the unspoiled prairie, descriptions of the many skills pioneer families had to have to live away from civilization, and the occasional setback or unexpected scare, this book was just one bleak episode after another. Even though the books are mostly true, I found myself at the point of thinking that there was no way things could be that bad only to have them get worse in the next chapter. I can’t recall any other book that I have read that really drove home the utter despair of winter. So, even though we’ve been enjoying what has really amounted to a very full-length autumn, every night for the last several weeks Charlotte and I have spent a half an hour or so struggling with survival in our imaginations.
Looking out my window, all wrapped up in my cozy slanket, and knowing that all I have to do in the morning is spend an hour with the snowblower clearing out my driveway, winter’s not looking all that fierce at the moment.
