And Now For Something Entirely Different

I need a rest from all the heaviness of the past couple of days and so do you, probably. So I'll talk about what's really on my mind at the moment: the weather. I had to get my outdoor chores done very early this morning because we are expecting something to start falling from the sky in a couple of hours. As I type this and look out my window, the sky looks leaden, pregnant with ....stuff. Sleet. Freezing rain. Probably anything but snow, the most pleasant of likely heavenly gifts. They all make my walks impossible and driving dicey. We have the humidifier on in the house but I still keep dropping things because my fingers are so dry. Smelly lotions.

And it's not even February yet.

Ok, ok, you live where it's colder and I don't know from cold. You're at zero while we're in the balmy 20s. Here, you'd be sweating, you'd have to wear shorts and a tank top, you'd be having cookouts and taking sunbaths. Well, good for you and your thick blood. I'm cold!

In 1958 Falls Church had a snowstorm with just the right conditions to knock out our electricity for a week. How cool! You could see your breath in the house. We camped out inside. We had a fireplace and a gas stove, so we didn't starve. Somehow our plumbing withstood the cold--no pipes broke, so we could still flush the toilets. We had no TV, but we didn't miss it, because my mother had only recently lifted her year-long embargo on it. A while earlier, she had decided that she hated the noise and the crazy laugh tracks and just wanted quiet. If there was something really good on we'd go to the neighbors' and make an evening of it. So we got used to reading, or talking, or listening to music on the radio, where at that time stations were still --radical notion--trying to cater to the broadest possible audience and so played a huge variety of musical styles.

When we finally dug out we felt how animals must feel after hibernation--except we weren't starving. Here are the two neighborhood kids I grew up with, Judy Clever and Don Miller, on the first day out. You can see most of the snow is gone--it took that long for the electricity to be restored.

It's about 45 minutes since I started writing. Nothing falling yet. Will the weatherman be proven a liar once again? The sky is still enceinte. I'll be perfectly happy as long as we don't have a replay of 1958.

Judy and Don, where are you????