Something About Snowstorms

By the time you read this, the big snowstorm may have moved into Northern Colorado. I'd be looking forward to it if we hadn't planned to travel this week. We'll wait it out through today before canceling anything. Northern Colorado weather doesn't always do what the forecasters predict.

I love snow. I love to stand at the window with a cup of coffee and watch it fall, love the eerie silence outdoors first thing on a frosty white morning, love to trudge out to the trees and use a broom to knock the heavy stuff off the branches. Shoveling snow? Don't love that quite as much, but I pitch in and help when necessary.

When I was a kid, a big snow was often an adventure. I lived on a farm in central Illinois where the winds blew huge drifts across the road in front of our house, making it impossible to leave for days. The power would go out as well. We had oil burning stoves in our kitchen and living room, so we kept warm, and my mom could heat water and food there as well. Since we didn't have a television yet, and personal computers didn't exist, there wasn't much left to do but go to bed early. No matter what you've read about Abraham Lincoln studying by candlelight, it's very hard to do once you're accustomed to electric lights.

One time there was a big storm with high winds, and my dad, mom, younger brother, and I were trying to make it home from town in a car. We got stuck where the snow had blown across the road about a mile from our house. We left the car behind and trudged through the drifts, first stopping at the only house along the way to warm up, then continuing until we made it home. My mother swears I repeatedly wailed, "We're all going to die out here."

As I mentioned yesterday, I was once snowed in for a long weekend with a husband and three teenaged boys. This was in town, and we did not lose power, so I spent a lot of the time wearing headphones which were connected to my stereo (no IPods or even Walkmans back then).

That time I was muttering, "We're all going to die in here." Those teenagers do not know just how lucky they were that the roads were opened up in three days...

Remember the snowstorm in The Shining? I'm just saying.