A Lovely Blizzard

Through the windows, against the white of the snow, you could see the trees bending in the wind last night.  This morning, the branches of the evergreens were not sagging under the weight of accumulated snow because the wind had swept the snow clear. It's the light, fluffy snow of a cold storm.

Ms. Maud was as cross as an older sister watching her little brother toddling toward the busy street--she, correctly as always, inveighed heavily against trying to shovel this stuff. Already, only hours into the storm, there is no question about shoveling the driveway. Ms. Maud was right: No way. There will be no way to snow blow it, for that matter. My neighbor has a truck with a plow and he can be relied upon to take pity. We'll buy him a dinner at the Library (Portsmouth) at the end of the season, and he'll eat his steak happily and he'll say, as he always does, "Happy doing business with you. Here's to snow next winter."  New Hampshire folkways. 

I did go out to rake the roof (sorry, Maud, but less likely to be fatal than shoveling). Tugboat was eager to get out into it and he did his dolphin thing through the snow, disappearing beneath the white crests, leaping out again. He had to figure out where and how to poop, which took a while, but he managed. Then he was done and demanded to be taken in. 

I walked down the street and enjoyed the sound of the storm. All you can hear is the wind. No other sounds. After the storm, if you walk in the woods behind my house, you will hear very little. That's one of the best things about snow--the silence. It's why I hate snowmobiles. If they were as silent as dogsleds, I'd be all for them, but they roar.  The silence of snow is worth a lot. By the time I reached the cul de sac, children's voices. They were trying to sled.  Sent me back to childhood.

Mephistopheles tells Dr. Faustus the saddest thing is remembering happier times.  I don't agree. The sadness derives from the feeling you will never see happier times, your arc is downward, all your best sins are behind you.  But hearing those tinkling voices in the snow brought to mind images of friends from snows past.

This is a genuine blizzard. I did not have to call in to work to say I couldn't make it in. They wouldn't allow me on Rte 95 into Massachusetts today, unless I was in an ambulance.  No ambiguities today. 

My son, in New York, will have trouble getting from his apartment on the Upper West Side, across the Park to Mt. Sinai Hospital.  He is supposed to try to get in to catch the hospital shuttle to Elmhurst, the city hospital where Mt. Sinai residents get a view of how the other 90% live, die and get ill. He assured his mother he won't do anything stupid, but we know him.

In fact, his mother behaved no better when she was caught in the blizzard of 1978.  We were living in sin in a farmhouse in southern Rhode Island, on a pond, on a potato farm, half a mile from the Amtrak station at Kingston.  When that blizzard hit, it paralyzed the state. Not even the trains could make it through. 

After two days of reading by the fire, and after many phone calls from the nurses in the ICU at Roger Williams Hospital in Providence, she decided she would do a Dr. Zhivago and try to get 45 miles north to the city. The nurses were running out of tampons, toothpaste, all the vital supplies, and not even the pharmacies could open. The hospital pharmacy was not for the nurses and didn't have that a lot of that  stuff anyway. Keeping a garrulous person in a farm house when her nurse friends, fun (and likely a few interns) beckoned, was not going to happen:  She pulled on her boots and I walked her to the station through the drifts, and the train eventually groaned in, looking like it had only barely escaped the Bolsheviks, and off she went to the party at the hospital.

Back home at the farm, the snow piled up. I had my books, my typewriter and, occasionally, a working television--reception was iffy--and my record collection. Played a lot of Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker and watched the snow change colors with the rise and setting of the sun. It was solitude. It would not last forever. The power went out briefly, but the house stayed warm. It was a good time, overall.

Now I have a generator if the power goes out. And a gas fireplace, which will someday blow the house up. I have my roof rake, and I'm playing my current favorite Dylan album (Blood on the Tracks) on my i pod as I pull the snow off the roof.

 Overall, I cannot say, looking back at the blizzard of '78, that it was any better than this blizzard of 2015. 

Every blizzard has its charms.