"...And like a never-dying force, the wind
Roared till we shouted with it... " 'The Wanderer' John Masefield
Wild weather this February has brought. Yesterday's snows were so heavy that they left close to two hundred thousand people without power in just two Hudson Valley counties. Then came the rain, the rising streams, the flooded roads, and predictions of the worst still to come.
We expected a foot of snow in our little town today. Instead we got some fat, jolly flakes, a lot of rain and a lot of slush.
The storm arrived tonight. As I sit here writing, I feel like I'm in a ship at sea. The wind is lashing the driving rain against the house and howling around the corners. People we know have deserted their homes, people who lost power yesterday and have no hope of getting it back before the weekend. We've been lucky. We've got heat, lights, even our connection to the web.
Yet we're alone tonight, tossing and pitching in the center of a furious winter storm, listening to the rain pound against the windows. I worry that if the temperatures drop just a little, that rain will freeze. Then we'll be adrift in a sea of ice. I worry about the people who have to go out and I'm grateful I'm not one of them.
I can ride out the storm, secure under the covers tonight. Tomorrow morning I will wake up and the occasional stream below the rocks in our backyard will be a pond. It's possible the wind will still be screaming. Or perhaps it will all be over, and everything will seem swept clean, scrubbed and fresh.
1 comment:
When we lived in a third floor apartment even a mild wind-storm could seem ominous. Now we're in a small house in a town famous for tornados on a devastating day in 1974 - but I feel safer.
Good luck tonight! I vote for the latter scenario - no wind, no ice, the world scrubbed clean.
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