Relative Something

As I was standing in the driveway, up to my knees in the swirling snow, listening to the howling gusts of wind that evoked the sound effect of every recorded depiction of a storm I’ve ever heard, I tried to think when I have ever experienced this before in my life. How do you absorb the full depth of drama you are living in the moment that it happens, without knowing the reference the event will be measured against?

Well, for me, making sense out of things is complicated by my feeble memory. How does this compare to the Halloween blizzard of ’91? That one had a different kind of snow, and I don’t recall it being so windy. I don’t recall needing to move so much snow off of this driveway in the 20-plus years we have lived here, but in fairness, a while back we expanded the driveway by adding a parking pad to the side.

There have been times when one of the piles of snow to the side our driveway has gotten so tall that it is difficult to throw any more snow over it, but I don’t recall it being that way for the full length of both sides. It’s still December! Where will I put the snow next time we get a shovel-able amount?

One thing I was sure of, as I leaned on my shovel to rest in the darkness that had descended on my now 3 and 1/2 hour job, this was right up there with any other significant winter weather event. Once inside again, my intuition proved adept as national news sources began to take notice. It didn’t hurt to get a little extra press from the NFL as our storm initially just foiled the attempts of the visiting team from New York to land here due to the airport closure, forcing them to spend the night in Kansas City. Eventually, the game was moved out a day, and then the roof of our sports stadium collapsed, putting the plans for the game in question entirely.

After the fact, taken as a whole, with accumulated snow totals, actual temperature and wind gust readings, and the collection of events impacted by the storm factored in, that moment I was experiencing was historic, indeed.