Sunday night, before the storm hit, I headed to the grocery store. I pulled into the oversized parking lot under an ominous sky, the plummeting temperature palpable, clouds preparing to let loose the cold white confetti inside of them. Inside and the sky turned into fluorescent lights hung from ceilings that were two stories tall for some reason. Along with the usual stuff, I bought extra canned vegetables and dried beans. The brightly colored cereal boxes felt even more wrong than they normally do. No one was sure how long exactly the storm would last for, and I wanted to be prepared. As I walked out of the grocery store, the first snowflakes started to fall. I hurried home over asphalt that would soon be coated in ice and snow.
The snow poured down through the night. I woke up in the middle of the night, and saw the ground coated in snow out my window. When I woke up for real, still earlier than I normally do, it was two feet above the ground. It was an hour before I normally got up but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I walked downstairs and looked at the snow piled through the sliding glass door in the living room. It was almost two feet high. And it was still coming down. Not as heavily as before, and sky wasn’t ominous, just a plain gray. But no way to leave the house to get to work. I walked around the house, looking at the familiar lawn chairs and plants and rocks as they drowned in the snow, unable to reach for help. My phone lit up with a Slack from my boss saying the office was closed today. I ate the overnight oats I had started for breakfast and went back to bed to lay down and fell asleep.
When I woke up, the snow had come down another foot and was coming down even harder that it had in the night. The sky was still a quiet solid gray, but the snow was unrelenting. By three o’clock, it was twelve feet deep. From the first floor windows all you could see was a wall of snow. All of the lawn furniture was lost. From the second floor you could see the top half of trees sticking out. They looked like the trees on the riverbed in spring. The snow came down faster, and I watched the second floor windows become completely blocked by the dark white. I wondered how the storm would look from the buildings in Chicago, if this was just a tiny inch from up there, if it would pile up high enough to block their view too or if they could still see the lake. Shortly later I lost internet and cell reception. I figured the snow was up over the roof now, and I was buried, lost to the outside world. The power went out. My neighbors were buried right next to me.
Around then is when I started cooking a pot of dried beans. I could kind of keep track of time, snow is white enough that the light felt like it was coming through. At least it never felt like it was fully dark, which was good since there wasn’t any power to light things by. It doesn’t really matter how long you cook dried beans for, which made it harder to keep track of time. Every “morning” I’d wake up and read, then sleep for a bit, then eat lunch, then read some more, try to exercise, read some more. My phone was the only clock I had and it died after a few days.
I thought I owned a lot of books I’d never read before the storm started. But once it started and there was time I was going through them. Read Gravity’s Rainbow in two days. Few weeks in, I’d read every book I owned once. That was when it started to get good. The library was sealed, every book referenced another one, a locked room mystery. I knew there was something more to solve, I didn’t have every piece of the puzzle put together yet, and I had all the suspects here. Presented with only the option of rereading, books start to feel a lot different, you have to read the words differently. It’s like when you’re sick as a child and watching the TV all day and watching the afternoon programming, it can’t possibly go anywhere since everything good happens at night but there’s still more to unearth. I empathized with and felt jealous of the homeschooled girls who lived an hour away across the cornfields from the kind of house I lived in and only owned copies of Jane Austen. My food was bland once I ran out of avocados. Black beans and rice really need avocado to taste good.
The power came back on first. I plugged in my phone and once it charged I could see the cell service was back too. Then I started to see the snow melt, water droplets dripping along the second floor window before I could even see out it. When I finally could the snow was so much dirtier than the pure white snow I had seen come down from the sky. Melting made it icy and malformed, warped by the angle of the sun and the objects it pushed against, not the pure white when it came from the sky directly on to the ground. When I could, I opened the second floor window and could feel that it was almost sixty degrees outside. I’d been inside for so long that I pushed out the screen and climbed out, into the ice packed snow. I got a Slack message from my boss that said “you think we’ll be able to get back to it soon?” and I didn’t respond. Outside was warm and cold at once in the best way possible. I wanted to walk across the eight feet of snow left on the ground directly into someone else’s window. I walked around, but none of the other windows were open. A few houses down one of my neighbors was trying to shovel his driveway for some reason. He had cut a two foot trench and you still couldn’t see the garage door. No one else was outside.
The snow kept melting. Soon it was down to a few feet and the snow plows could come. I shoveled my driveway, which I don’t usually do. I went to the store and bought avocados. The roads were icy but I drove slow. The next day work was open. I saw my neighbor getting into his car at 8:15am, just like me. And we smiled at each other, “looks like it’s finally over huh”. We didn’t say anything to each other when we got home, since we didn’t get home at the same time.
