I made the mistake the other week of being rather dismissive of Britain's recent snowstorm, until I realized that it really had been quite a mess of frozen pipes, accidents, injuries, etc. Over the years, one of the areas of American superiority I felt I could claim was the hardiness of having endured a lifetime of weather extremes. My memory is that when I was young, Schenectady regularly received annual snowfall well over 100 inches, and I've lived in other exceedingly snowy spots like Minnesota and Montana. In terms of temperatures, I have experienced a span of at least 150 degrees F over the course of my lifetime, from -30 or colder on a few occasions in Duluth (with wind chills much lower) to a few minutes of 115 or higher when I changed buses once in Las Vegas. Most years the range has been more like -20 to 90, and this was even before climate chaos really gained momentum. That sense of having spent inordinate amounts of one's life energy simply dealing with the elements is acute, but our modern experiences pale beside those of earlier eras, don't they? We've found ways to buffer ourselves somewhat from the extremes, which are likely to have caused even more extremes.
Perhaps it's just the "62 effect," and being done with a whole host of struggles, not the least of which is that of dealing with multiple feet of snow, layers of coats, shoveling, decisions about whether to wear heavy boots or ice grippers, etc. I try to imagine what it would be like to live any place where one's creative energies are not regularly distracted by extremes, natural or manmade. But today I am where I am, at the epicenter of the swirling snows, and there is one thing I feel far more than my lack of enthusiasm for the scene outside my window -- enormous gratitude for being inside, warm and safe. Let's all hunker down today and just let the storm do its thing.
