OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Snowstorm as Spectacle

December 20th, 2008

I wish I had something brilliant and original to say tonight, but this week it has been all about the weather, and most weather has happened before and is happening to a whole bunch of people at the same time, and as my online activity narrows to obsessively checking weather sites, I don’t have any delusions of having any unique insight into the weather. On the other hand, the number of times I have left the house in the last ten days is actually less than the number of cities Raven has travelled to in the same period, which does seem to distort reality a little, allow me to forget about the world beyond our house, our street, our neighborhood. The amount of food (and toilet paper!) in the house was diminishing and I had thoughts of rationing, of caching away a personal stash, thoughts I am not proud of… especially as there are lots of great places within walking distances that actually sell food and toilet paper. It probably was not the week for post apocalyptic fiction, not that that stopped me. I have watched the white encroach and recede, footsteps tracking past our house, the footsteps erased, and I admit a lot of the watching is comfortably from behind a window. The kids had snow days Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but of course there was no planning day to day on whether they’d be home or not, and even though I am not one to get excited about holiday parties at their school, there was a disconcerting sense of lacking closure in the having intermittent snow days the week before vacation, of rituals left undone.

In any case, the snow keeps coming down, and now that Raven is home (sixteen days!) I feel a little more relaxed, a little more able to enjoy a feeling of coziness rather than feeling desolate and stranded, grateful that there is no need or obligation to go anywhere or do more than practice with the boys, play goofy games of Scrabble where our six year old is allowed to put down any set of letters that phonetically resemble an English word, watch movies, read.

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