The Blizzards of '91 and 2010

I don’t know what date it is lately until I type it. But I know it’s Saturday, exactly two weeks before Christmas. Mia and I were going to go Christmas shopping today but we got snowed in by the worst blizzard since 1991’s Halloween blizzard. We were talking about it and Mia said that she couldn’t believe we took them out in that.

I said, “Wasn’t it the most fun Halloween ever?”

“Yeah, for us,” she said. “But what about for you?”

If I fretted over it at the time I sure don’t remember it. We weren’t driving. We walked from our house up toward Cherokee Park and there was a feel of such camaraderie from everyone we ran into – as if we are feeling like a bunch of fools and at the same time like hardy mid-westerners.

Today, I haven’t been out. Donny decided to give it a try and got stuck at the end of the driveway going out and coming back both. There’s about three feet of snow outside our door (and everyone else’s) and I think he plowed just about the whole street in whatever little vehicle he has – which has no cab.

Five hours later, I’m so tired from baking that I can hardly make it to my room to sit down, and Donny comes in frozen, saying he’s not sure he’s going to make it downstairs to the shower.

We are at that age where we don’t know our limits until they’re suddenly confronting us. “Okay, can’t take another step.” It sounds dumber when the activity is baking, but nonetheless it’s the fact of the matter.

Like the sky dropping all this snow on us, we don’t know when to quit and it’s not quite as fun as the blizzard of ’91, which was, even though it seems impossible, nearly 20 years ago.

It’s okay though. Mia and Angie helped. It didn’t start out real smooth but the more tired we got and the more things went wrong the more fun it was.

That was really the beauty of the blizzard of ’91 too. It was just plain wrong to get a foot of snow on Halloween. You can get giddy with that kind of thing.