Blizzard!

Call it whole-body shock: After spending two months in California, where the plum and cherry trees had already begun blossoming—where I was able to take a Brazilian dance class twice a week and even tie on my tap shoes for the first time in over 20 years—I flew back east again, back to my life in Connecticut, where a very relieved and happy husband had been pining for my return.

This is my third winter in the northeast. Little did I know that it was going to be the coldest and snowiest winter the region has seen in almost a decade.

Wayne picked me up at JFK carrying a tote-bag containing my white furry hat, my longest down coat, some sealskin mittens Julian had bought me in Denmark, and a pair of fuzzy knee-high boots.

But the single-digit temperature came as a shock to my system nonetheless—and I was returning skinnier than I’d been since high school, weighing in at 110 pounds.

My Bay Area friends and family were loving and wonderful, taking me out for meals and lending me rain-gear and sweaters when the weather unexpectedly changed. One of my poet friends gave me the use of her car while she and her husband were on vacation. Both my calendar and my heart were full as I threw my arms around everyone and everything that I’d loved about my life in Berkeley.

I’d arrived relatively unprepared, not realizing that I’d stay for such a long time.

It was magical for me, being in the Bay Area again—and on many levels, I hated to leave. My biggest regret is that I was too stressed, and too pressed for time at the end, to attend a last meeting of my much beloved Women’s Poetry Potluck & Salon, even though I had said I would be there—and I meant to be there. I hope I can redeem my honor with my literary sisters who have done so much to encourage and comfort me over the years.

But I couldn’t stay, any more than Emily was able to stay when she came back to revisit her old life for a single day in “Our Town.”

Day 1 of the Blizzard

Snow is falling outside our windows, but the air is relatively still. I look out on the bare winter branches of the dormant, impossibly tall tulip poplar tree reaching up past the roofline—and, in the distance, the iconic little farm that’s part of our everyday view.

This blizzard, I’ve read, will blot out everything further away than four or five city blocks. Will radically shrink the world in our visible field. Will freeze my world beneath a blanket of powdered ice.

Will enclose us here, as if inside a casket.

What will that be like? My insatiably curious inner child wants to know.

In my childhood, growing up in Los Angeles, the most exotic thing imaginable was snow.

The Blizzard: Day 2

From my much-loved Morris chair, facing the northeast windows in my writing room, I’m looking out at the blowing snow as if from the vantage point of a cloud. Snow is blowing in sideways from the northwest in great billowy drifts, as if a god’s great down pillow had burst open.

From this perch inside our house, I’m at the same level that a bird would be in the tulip poplar tree, if there were any birds that dared perch there at this time of year. There was a squirrel who climbed up into its branches briefly yesterday. But there’s no sign now of life of any kind in those snow-dusted, brittle-looking branches.

Walking underneath it in the summer and fall, I’d find these odd little green and orange bracts that fell on the grass from on high—and I’d put them in water until they started to rot.

The tree’s spindly branches look so convincingly dead. I know with my brain that it’s still alive in there. But it’s more difficult to convince my heart.

In its upper reaches, the poplar’s tri-partite trunk is moving back and forth in the icy wind. There are a few small broken branches stuck among the ones that are still attached. How far beneath the earth must the roots extend to anchor this behemoth in place?

All the other trees I can still see through the snow-laden air are swaying madly: the evergreens with their greeting-card dusting of snow. The spruce with their bare feathery branches like inverted brooms sweeping the sky.

Now the wind is whistling outside with a sound reminiscent of the added-on soundtrack of “The Gold Rush.”

Somehow, winter cold knows how to worm its way into the place inside me where I tend to panic. It’s a place connected, I think, to the fairytales my mother used to read to me: “The Snow Queen” comes to mind, the beloved beauty with a shard of ice lodged in her heart. Insensible to the suffering of those who have made the mistake of loving her. Rapunzel imprisoned in the Witch’s tower. Hans Christian Anderson’s little mermaid, who foolishly traded both her immortality and her beautiful voice for the ability to walk on land, believing the Prince would recognize her as the one who had saved him. Allowing the Sea Witch to cut out her tongue.

My mother told me, much later, that I cried inconsolably for days when, unthinkingly, she read me the ending.

I look out at the snow, wondering if it will ever stop falling. If I will ever be able to walk outside and breathe deeply again. If we’ll be able to drive out and get groceries.

Will we be reduced, like Charlie Chaplin, to eating our leather shoes?

How can the ornamental cherry tree, all brittle and brown now, continue in its faith that spring will arrive, in the context of so much snow?

All the squirrels have gone to ground. The footprints of the black bear who came close to the window by my side of the bed a week ago, and left telltale amber stains in the snow, must surely have heeded the call to hibernate.

Photo by Sølve on Unsplash

Where do they go?

Three feet is the record for snowfall in Connecticut for a 24-hour period. But Nature is an athlete who exults in surpassing her previous records.

What if, this time, in this blizzard, we see ten times that much snow fall? What if so much snow falls that this two-story house is buried, here at the top of this hill?

What if this house is transformed, like those pioneer houses dug into the side of a hill by settlers in the Old West, into a hole in the snow with windows looking out on whiteness, with a little sunlight perhaps leaking through, but essentially windows without a view, like the grimmest basement apartments in a grimy American city?

Nature is patient and persistent. Knows that snow accumulates, in the presence of freezing temperatures, bit by bit.

Maybe Nature has had it with humankind.

The snow is falling now in airborne drifts, much thicker than before: clouds of it.

Is the heat still working? I’m suddenly chilled.

Wayne is in the kitchen making breakfast. He’s so much more attentive than I am to our need to keep eating, whereas I tend to get distracted by other things.

The trees are waving even more frantically now than before. The snow is blowing across our tall windows in waves.

How awful it would be to be out in it! How grateful I am to be inside a nice warm house.

🇺🇦

Every day, Viktor Kravchuk’s posts from Ukraine help me keep things in perspective…

If you’ve read my 2022 novel, What Disappears, and loved it, but haven’t yet posted a review, it would be a wonderful favor to me if you’d do so! Vivaldi’s Virgins has hundreds of stellar reviews but its little sister has only 48. Fifty is apparently a magic number in the world of online books. I want to make sure I put myself in the best position possible, in this crazy publishing ecosphere, when my agent sends out my next title. ❤️