 |
| Where is the driveway??? |
A forecast is one thing: “A
winter storm may....”
“Accumulation could be up to....” Possible blowing and drifting....” Sometimes predictions
are fulfilled, and other times not much happens, after all. Then there are the
times that quite a lot happens, such as it did last March. And so we prepare. We fill
water containers and check the level on the propane tank. Make sure we have
food in the house. Arm ourselves with reading material. Check supply of candles and
lamp oil. Matches? Check!
 |
| Is there a world out there? |
Two nights ago the
temperature dropped and the wind rose. By morning the scene was wild. We had a wild ride to
Northport and back with groceries and mail. -- No, that sounds all wrong. David drove very attentively and carefully, on the highway and through town.
 |
| Northport on Tuesday morning |
Road and driveway, village streets
and sidewalks, all had been deep in slush that had now turned to ice. Our
pack came home in the early afternoon, seeing no reason to hang around town.
As the afternoon wore on, the
wind grew ever wilder. “What do you call this?” I kept asking David, and he’d
say, “It’s a blizzard,” but there was another word haunting the edges of my
mind. Finally it came to me: tempest! The word is not used as often in English,
at least in America, as it is in French (la tempête), but that was the word I
wanted. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” That’s King Lear, not
Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” but we are hardly on a tropical isle, are we?
Sometimes during a blizzard, if the wind blows hard enough, coming in over Lake Michigan and swooping down on our old farmhouse behind the hill, it will drive a little line of snow under the front porch door. That's a strong wind. This storm? We got a new, cold, white area rug on the cement porch floor. Snow did not fall yesterday, gently or otherwise: no, it was driven
horizontal by the wind, and that was in milder moments--the rest of the time it
was whirling madly in tornado-like snow devils, with snow devils and waving
sheets of snow flying from the top of rapidly rising drifts, like blowing sand
from the top of desert dunes in a sandstorm or like spindrift from ocean waves.
Sarah and I ventured out a couple of times, but she was not at all reluctant to
return to the warm house when I’d had enough of wind and snow and given up on trying to capture reality with my camera. |
| The barn is no shelter from the wind |
It was a good day to be indoors, reading
Paul Auster’s Winter Journal,
along with a novel I’ll tell you about in a few days. It was a good day to have
a chicken braising in the pot, to have soup simmering and cookies baking. It was a marvelous opportunity to do a little trimming on Sarah's shaggy coat. We still had power
for an after-dinner movie, and at bedtime David and I read to each other, he to
me from Bella Tuscany, I to him
from Winter Journal.
The wind howled all night and
was still cracking its cheeks at dawn. Will it never be out of breath? It will be good to have lots of snow for Saturday's Winter Carnival in Northport--that's at Braman Hill, 11 to 4--but let's hope the wind takes the day off.
 |
| Mice, voles, skunks, bunnies--all snuggled down today |
