The Storm

You may not have heard, but there was something of a storm last week. I live in New England. Blizzards are nothing new to me. I’ve driven in them, I’ve shoveled out from them, I’ve spent countless hours staring out the window at cars skidding around the corner. And I can say that in my twenty six and a half years, I have never seen one this bad.

For example, this is a visual representation of my driveway the next morning, a Saturday:

You think it just looks like a white square? That’s because it’s buried under two feet of snow! A snow shoveling service came to clean it out Sunday afternoon. And you might think that being snowed in isn’t an altogether bad thing. It wouldn’t have been if the power hadn’t gone out.

At about eight p.m., I noticed the lights flickering. I cringed every time it happened, until nine twenty when the power shut off completely. Earlier in the night I even tweeted about how I’d better shut down my computer in case of a power outage, but I did so to give myself the night off from editing, not because I believed something would actually happen.

No power, no television, no internet—I’ve dealt with that before. My posts were all set up for the week and I didn’t absolutely need to write during the weekend. But there’s one tiny problem when the power goes out in the winter: there’s no heat. I spent most of the weekend buried under two blankets, two quilts, and two cats.

So that was an adventure. And by adventure I mean punch to the face. The power didn’t come back on until two o’clock on Sunday, at which point I had to shovel out the end of the recently plowed driveway because the snowplows clearing the street kept burying it.

Winter can be over now please.