what i did during the bizzard

last thurs we left work early bc the blizzard was said to be incoming. fri was no school, only some snow, but the roads here get icy & the buses can't roll. all students in our district are bussed unless parents take them via car. no buses = no school district-wide. one route is a 45 min ride to-from school, to an alpine mountain "club." its only in-out access (unless folks want to go around, taking 2+ hrs to campus) is a twisty, windy, 2-lane road varying from 6 to 9k in elevation. that's the kicker, the one that usually has our district calling school for the day - it's quickly impassable. one time, an entire school bus nearly slid from the drop-off into the pines. i don't know quite how they got it out, only that more than one piece of rescue equipment was involved. anyways, no school. then the wkend hit & with it, the blizzard, hereafter known as "the great blizzard of 2023." the icy downpour seemed first like a christmas movie of old, soft & lovely, then after a while permutating in all the ways snow can, settling into a viciously icy deluge from hell (if it was a place of freezing). i woke on the 3rd morn to turquoise sky & thinking it had passed wrote a poem. even went out in mid-thigh snowpack to clear the driveway, a plus-2 hour task. we snuck out to bakersfield when the i-5 opened, had italian sandwiches & ice cream, drove a box of torrones & pyrenee's bread to mom & dad at their retired teachers meeting. felt the sun on our faces. magnificent! but back home that eve the snow returned with seeming vengeance, the sky black, the winds bansheeing, the white sheets freezing, the house ever-colder, even with fireplace blazing. where were the roads? our cars? nothing but whiteness, a blank blanket almost evilly sub-freezing, melvillian. what to do? there was little. cook. read. hot tea & coffee. check the weather forecast & road conditions 3 times per hour. some exercise, tho it was too frigid to put aside the blankets. call family. a thousand thoughts passed through my noggin & came out the other side. i think james hoped to sleep away his time, but eventually he got up. we didn't practice any music bc he said it was too cold, & i guess it was. we watched chopped then made food in our air fryer. watched films on tubi, that freely-streaming treasure box of cinephilia: gilbert (about gottfried; we had to turn it off twice, sobbing for different reasons); the wolf house (eerily beautiful, creepy, desolately sad, stop-animated parable of south american nazi-ism); & others i already forgot. on pluto, another freely-streaming tv service, we found an i love lucy channel! let the dogs out, in, out, in, out. cancelled gigs. contemplated new ones. watched & rewatched & recited dialogue with the office. played stupid phone games. began obsessing about real estate in places w/o winter weather, ones we couldn't visit bc every road out of frazier mountain was closed. with the deep, deep cold permeating the house & our bones, & nothing warm seeming possible, i thought a lot about gene taylor, how evil the universe & Fate can seem to be, but what to do? the past isn't changeable. say a prayer, put on more clothes, & try to turn thoughts to something positive, try try try.... now here is the good part: through it all, we realized we got closer. james dryly told dad, "i've been in much worse, much smaller quarters, for much longer, with much-less desirable companions." i read a book about a man who lost his spouse to illness & realized how lucky i am to have my james. each day, we wake up. he is handsome, silly, smart, brave, & like all couples, we get on each other's nerves at times, but he is my person & i am his. for what was i complaining? a little ice? i have a roof, my health, & love... family members wrote books this past year: brother-in-law, dad, sister. not sure about bro-in-law's, his memoir about being a drug addict turned preacher & human traffic victim-rescuer, however i've been editing dad's, an exhaustive history of the kern county fair. he's been putting the finishing touches on it for months. he & angie (dear sister) were neck-&-neck to the finish line; angie won, declaring her book, a "cozy romance about pro-wrestling" (and more) finished. dad now says he will send me his entire book via docs so i can complete the edits & he can call his done, as well. meanwhile, in the last days of the storm, i've been reading & editing angie's, marveling at her imagination & how she has taken threads & chapters of her life & wrapped them into a fiction. i cannot do that & never will, but it's gratifying to see the painstaking care & craft that has gone into both her & dad's disparate works. i hope they both publish. i hope her's becomes a bestseller, because it just might-could. well, i think that is it for now. goodness & gratitude bless the sun at this moment shining, our giver of life, our golden, warming source. the little animals are cavorting, tweeting, chirping, hopping, & flying in the warming tundra outside & now, six days after it started, the storm has ceased & this life now is gooder than ever.