I'm fascinated by you. You're a beauty. I sit next to the window looking out over my yard, the street, the yard beyond, the cemetery behind that, at white, shadowless white, white on the ground, billowing in the air, the sky itself (though a little greyish. Against this, trees, fencing, windows and doors on nearby houses all are black. In flock fluttery by: black birds. Navigating very carefully the top of a chain link fence: a black cat.
Plows go by, their normal clangor muffled as they push a thick quilting of snow off the roadbed (and onto my cars). I don't hear traffic, I don't hear people shouting at each other as they scrape with their shovels. The only sound is the consistent, sometimes soft, sometimes loud, roar of the wind.
This is a found day. News of your coming started to grab my attention yesterday morning, fueled by gleeful predictions of record-breakings and hardships. My students, all from blizzard-free zones, were curious, nervous, excited. Announcements of T shut down, school cancellations, declarations of emergency: it was clear yesterday that today there would be just you, Juno.
We tracked your progress up the coast, dodging this way and that, your core of low pressure pulling in cold, moist winter ocean air and whipping it into high velocity snow aimed all day at the New England coast. White out? I don't see it. Still, you're a lollapalooza of a storm, and far from done, judging by the great plumes of snow you are swooshing off my neighbor's roof.
These days storms have names and you are named after the jealously vengeful wife of the lord of Olympus, Jupiter, the wielder of thunder and lightning. But you are also goddess of the hearth, and last night, sitting in my living room with its read furniture, curtains drawn a great book on my lap, my wife working on a jigsaw puzzle, the prospect of a day ahead unexpectedly swept free of obligations, I felt the warmth, the coziness, that is your hallmark. How much more snug we feel inside, the more blustery you are outside.
And you are blustery. Predictions are be made about whether you'll dump more story than the previous record holders: the mid-February storm of 2013 that gave us over 27 inches or the wonderfully memorable Blizzard of '78 that brought the region to a dead stop for a week. The actual amount of snow can vary from nothing where some vortex of wind sweeps the ground bare or three feet or more in drifts, not to mention the amount piled against my cars by the plows.
We'll have to get out and move it all and find places to put it. The work is yet to come. A snow day has its own agenda. But Juno, my atmospheric inamorata, local and recent expression of the air we breath, as I look out at the swish and register the roar, I find you wonderful.
Plows go by, their normal clangor muffled as they push a thick quilting of snow off the roadbed (and onto my cars). I don't hear traffic, I don't hear people shouting at each other as they scrape with their shovels. The only sound is the consistent, sometimes soft, sometimes loud, roar of the wind.
This is a found day. News of your coming started to grab my attention yesterday morning, fueled by gleeful predictions of record-breakings and hardships. My students, all from blizzard-free zones, were curious, nervous, excited. Announcements of T shut down, school cancellations, declarations of emergency: it was clear yesterday that today there would be just you, Juno.
We tracked your progress up the coast, dodging this way and that, your core of low pressure pulling in cold, moist winter ocean air and whipping it into high velocity snow aimed all day at the New England coast. White out? I don't see it. Still, you're a lollapalooza of a storm, and far from done, judging by the great plumes of snow you are swooshing off my neighbor's roof.
These days storms have names and you are named after the jealously vengeful wife of the lord of Olympus, Jupiter, the wielder of thunder and lightning. But you are also goddess of the hearth, and last night, sitting in my living room with its read furniture, curtains drawn a great book on my lap, my wife working on a jigsaw puzzle, the prospect of a day ahead unexpectedly swept free of obligations, I felt the warmth, the coziness, that is your hallmark. How much more snug we feel inside, the more blustery you are outside.
And you are blustery. Predictions are be made about whether you'll dump more story than the previous record holders: the mid-February storm of 2013 that gave us over 27 inches or the wonderfully memorable Blizzard of '78 that brought the region to a dead stop for a week. The actual amount of snow can vary from nothing where some vortex of wind sweeps the ground bare or three feet or more in drifts, not to mention the amount piled against my cars by the plows.
We'll have to get out and move it all and find places to put it. The work is yet to come. A snow day has its own agenda. But Juno, my atmospheric inamorata, local and recent expression of the air we breath, as I look out at the swish and register the roar, I find you wonderful.
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