The Snowy Day

They’re calling this one Snoverkill: our third (or is it the fourth, I can’t even remember…) winter storm in the past week. The forecast involves a little less accumulation this time, but it’s way more raucous than the last one--crazy winds and whiteout conditions. They’re even telling all the snowplow drivers to pull over. Miraculously, we still have power (hence this post), but I’m waiting for the curtain to fall at any moment.

Spent the morning doing some food prep just in case. I’ve always preferred gas cooking—I like the responsiveness and the reduced likelihood of turning on the wrong burner (which is a little issue of mine). And being able to cook w/o electricity is a no brainer, no? Unfortunately, we’re among the brainless…

Mercifully, the kids and I finally got out yesterday in the all too brief window between having our driveway cleared and the onset of the current snowstorm. We had a sanity-saving meetup with friends at the community center in Lovetown and went to the local pizza place for lunch. Was wonderful to have a little non-family human interaction and comforting to know that my exurban sisters are suffering along with me. One woman, whose spouse is an essential federal employee and was planning to spend the night in a hotel closer to his office, was talking about throwing her three kids in the minivan and driving to South Carolina. I think we talked her out of it, but it sounded like a pretty good plan on a certain level.

Was pretty proud of myself for remaining mellow during the last storm, but this one has me in kind of a tizzy. This is probably because we are so totally unprepared. I’ve been begging the Ever Lovin’ to collect some firewood and find our bloody camping stove (neither of which he has done). So we’d be just a little screwed if we lost power. C was doing some work out of town yesterday so I put in a request that he stop at my favorite crunchy co-op for some healthy fixins. They had closed the place up by the time he got there so he had to stop at the stinky Superfresh in a nearby town, which is very likely the worst grocery store on the planet (okay, second worst if that A&P is still open on Annunciation Street in NO). I refuse to even go in there after several dismal shopping experiences (more on that, lucky readers, in a future post). So he showed up at 10 pm with hormone treated hamburger and no tahini. He did, very thoughtfully, get chocolate which was some consolation.

Anyway, just heard that NYC, which totally missed out on Snowpocalypse, is slated for at least a foot in this round. My dear friend (and former Upper, Upper East Side roomie) Eileen posted a super cute pic on FB of her toddler looking out the window at the snow falling in Queens. She got me thinking about what may be the most perfect children’s book ever: Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day. We happened to pick up a volume of Keats’s collected work the last time we were at the library and have been enjoying the further adventures of Peter and getting to know some of his other wonderful characters. I didn’t know anything about Keats (except that I loved his work) before I took a look at the bio notes in this book. I always envisioned the author as some kind of Morgan Freeman-esque sage, but it turns out he was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. Anyway, he’s brilliant.

And here’s my favorite nursery rhyme in this kind of weather:

The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow,
And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

Haven’t seen any robins around here lately, but we’ve got a bunch of buzzards that like to hang out on top of our barn. Stay warm guys!