Winter Canvas

This morning, when I opened the shades of the same window from which I snapped the blizzard shot yesterday, I was greeted with a burst of sunshine that sparkled the incredible snowdrifts and hills throughout our neighorhood. One neighbor was out, scarf wound tightly around her neck and hood, snowblowing her sidewalk, and next door to her, another shoveled his walk while his sweater-adorned dogs pranced and dashed about as if they’d just been freed after a month in prison. The world has come alive!

A while later, when checking email messages, I was refreshed by the positive perspective of my friend describing her after-storm morning in Minnesota: “I love that satisfied feeling of digging out after a storm.” In her town, school was canceled for a few hours. Here, the city wisely lowered the likelihood of mishaps caused by overzealous street-travelers and canceled school citywide for the whole day.

My goals today will be to lop off the peak of the laundry mountain (much higher than usual due to my recent illness), then make my way out into the vast winterland to retrieve my daughter from her marathon sleepover, sign a book that has been ordered from fargostuff.com, and finally, make my way to the hospital to hold my son’s hand as his week-old staples are removed from the side of his head.

So far, no deaths have been reported as a result of the storm; none that I’ve heard of anyway. It seems our hunkering down and waiting it out has paid off, though laborious after-storm work will move forward at a diligent pace today (ask my almost-frostbitten husband, who was out there for two hours at daybreak shoveling).

It might seem to others like we northerners are missing out on a whole lot of wonderfulness by living in a climate with such extremes, but even the bitter winter comes with its perks — like the winter artwork that comes to us unexpectedly after a storm.