February 2019

Yesterday, it blizzarded — [It’s a past tense verb if I want it to be!] — all day!

It was one of those storms whereby, pretty much hourly, you think to yourself:

What?! It’s still snowing?!

Ensconced on the sofa in the living room, under my electric blanket, streaming Star Trek reruns on Netflix, aware — like a schoolkid sneaking a smoke in the bathroom, nervous about the odds of getting caught — that at any moment a tree branch secretly rotting away from the inside out, hanging above a power line, could succumb to the weight of the heavy, wet snow, leaving me to entertain myself old school, with print on paper.

Snow is one of Mother Nature’s greatest Yin & Yang elements. Aesthetically, it’s simply marvelous: flakes of infinite shapes and sizes flutter down from the sky, from an undefined blanket of cloud, weaving their random paths through the air, then landing, a lush confectioner’s frosting spread over everything, the Currier & Ives Instagram filter that I just invented and named.

Practically, however, snow can be a bossy dictator.

You: Snow, I just need to run into town to [meet some friends at the pub] or [get some groceries] or [buy some candles and firewood].

Snow:  LOL! Shut up and sit down!

And so you let go and give into the scenic splendor that you see out of every window; you slip on your boots and put some seed out for the Black-Capped Chickadees, and the Towhees, and the obnoxious, greedy Stellar’s Jays; you finally get into the flow of the novel you’d been reading less than a chapter at a time, and you rest in the comfort that your wife’s ride, at least, is an All-Wheel Drive vehicle.

And the snowfall is relentless and accumulating, continuing as it gets dark, but…

Overnight the temperature rises to just above 40° F, falling snow turns to rain, a lot of rain, and we wake to find the snow gone and just another ordinary day in the soggy Pacific Northwest.