On being snowbound

Being snowed in for a few days gave us a lot of time to reflect, a chance to spend time together, and many opportunities to do things we normally don't have time to do. Too bad we didn't take those opportunities. Oh, we had intentions of doing so:

What we planned to do:

• Clean out the basement.
• Redecorate.
• Take apart every computer in the house, dust all the little parts, and put them back together such that they can be used as robots that will clean and redecorate for us the next time we are snowed in.
• Make a plan to save the world.
• Or at least Haiti.

What we did:

• Promptly fell asleep for several hours each afternoon.

Occasionally we roused ourselves long enough to turn on the TV to see what was happening in the rest of the Mid-Atlantic area, which looked pretty much the same as what was happening outside our window, and to hear admonishments from state officials that under no circumstances should we venture outside. As if we could find the outside.

But the more we were told not to go out, the more we kind of wanted to, like when you're touring a cave and the tour guide tells you repeatedly NOT to touch the stalagmites, because they take like 500 kajillion years to form. Well, that's kind of how we felt about being told not to go out in a blizzard. Luckily, we fell asleep before we could act on our contrariness.

But we needed all that sleep to prepare us for the aftermath of the storm, when we all headed out to dig through the snow with whatever we could -- shovels, brooms, nitrogen bombs, etc. In our parking lot the mounds of snow covering the cars pretty much all looked alike, and people would spend hours shoveling out their car, only to find that it wasn't their car, it wasn't a car at all, but the local post office.

But as reported by news sources, there was some good news in all of this. People helped each other shovel and braved snowy roads to take each other to dialysis appointments. Even more astonishing, people in Washington DC were so transformed by nature's events that the city did not have a single murder for a whole week. In such dire circumstances one would have expected the murder rate to go up ("Long-time neighbors have it out over suspicions that one piled his personal snow on the other's property; wives hurl loaves of bread at each other"). It is heartwarming to know that humans can rise to the occasion and overcome their innate selfish behavior, especially when they have run out of food and need to be nice to their neighbor.

As the snow slowly melts, we have much to look forward to, like finding hidden treasures long buried -- grocery carts, mail from three months previous, etc. ("Alice! Here's that picnic table we thought we threw out!") But as life returns to normal, I sure will miss those naps.