My Birthday Blizzard

Even though the appropriate phrase for the day should be “65 and Still Alive”, I must confess there are huge swaths of my brain that never made it past 10!  For example, the part of the brain responsible for having mature responses to oncoming storms.  I never outgrew the crazy delight and anticipation of a storm, really any storm barreling it’s way toward me. 

Snow storms of course, were the most magical: the possibility of no school/no work, the captivating sight of wind-driven snow swirling under the streetlight, the world shimmering in diamonds when the storm ended and the sun came out.   I simply never outgrew the immense joy of that. 

So, today is my birthday, and what a great gift.  The only snag is, it is being delivered to the wrong zip code.  Not nature’s fault but mine for moving to a place where a blizzard would come under the category of the miraculous.

However, I can live vicariously, for one of my daughter’s lives in Baltimore, in the absolute bulls-eye of this storm and she also has that arrested development syndrome when it comes to snow.  Her sled is ready, the hot chocolate’s brewing, and with enough “Sherpa style” clothing and “Smart Wool” socks, she should be fine.

On the Cape we would be filling bath tubs with water plus as many jugs as we could muster for, when you are on a well, no electricity means no pump, ergo no water. Unlike a hurricane, blizzards cause no worries about food spoilage for the world is your refrigerator. 

I must say, part of feeling my 65 years is that I can start to say, old-person like, “when I was young” why even, “when I was middle-aged”, snowstorms weren’t named, not even bona fide blizzards.  They were simply blizzards.  There is something more menacing about a storm heading your way that has a name.  I don’t know when hurricanes decided to share that personal trait.  Perhaps when news became the hyperbole it is today.

One of our military assignments was 3 years at Ft Drum, NY.  There was a place that totally underplayed their snow. Calmly, “Lake Effect snow” would be forecast and that was it.  Wump! 4 ft of snow would arrive in the span of 12 hours or less and no one said much about it.  Our streets on base weren’t plowed in the normal manner but rather “packed down” till, leaving base meant your car had to nose dive a foot or so to the more traditionally plowed streets of the town.  My second daughter was born there in Feb and I thought I would likely be giving birth in a snow bank.  The total snow for that year was 12 ft and, once again, I don’t remember any Fox News coverage of that.  The fact that the troops from Alaska came to Ft Drum for winter training was pretty telling.

So, Happy Birthday to me, and again, I took the liberty of just prattling on rather than playing the instructor.  If you are in the path of this blizzard, I do pray you are safe so I don’t have to feel guilty about being excited about it.  And for information on how the snow is a blessing to some animals, you might want to look back at “Life in the Subnivian Zone” that was originally written on Feb 5, 2011. The salient facts remain the same. 

I can’t wait to hear from my daughter who will be my “snow boots” on the ground and see the pictures of what heights the drifts will achieve.  Stay warm everyone and may we all, in some part of our brain stay “Forever Young”.