Snowglobe

When I was ten years old, there was an epic January storm in Chicago that dumped 23″ of snow. It was forever known afterwards as The Blizzard of ’67. The snow started early in the morning and didn’t stop until the early hours of the following day. While accustomed to large amounts of snow, this one packed winds of up to 50 mph.

We went to school that day because that was what we were supposed to do. Dad went to work and, Mom, who loved the cold and snow, was at home with Ann. We got an early dismal from school and at about the time we would normally be coming home, Dad called Mom to say he was leaving work as it would take a bit longer to get home given the weather. What unfolded over the rest of the day and night I don’t remember except that every hour Mom and the boys would get into coats, boots, and gloves and go outside and shovel. My sisters and I watched from the living room window. When it got dark Mom went out alone and you could barely make her out as the snow swirled around her. She’d come in, wipe the tears from her cold face, warm up, and repeat. As the night wore on, Mom said Dad would be home any minute and shooed us all to bed.

What was normally an hour ride from work to home with his carpool buddy, Roscoe, took Dad eleven hours. He was driving our VW bug and credited that little car with being able to manuever where drivers in bigger cars weren’t able. It was also small enough and light enough to push when they got stuck. They got close to Roscoe’s house and Dad walked the remaining four blocks home.

The following day my three brothers went with Dad to dig the car out. Mom was in a panic because, Ann, who was only a year old needed milk and we were running out. We headed to the store, put a couple of gallons on our sled, and walked home.

This weekend we had a snowstorm that dumped half the amount of snow from that infamous blizzard of my childhood. For days before it had been predicted to land on Saturday afternoon starting with freezing rain and turning to snow. On Thursday I went to two different grocery stores – one was packed, the other nearly empty. I ran some errands on Saturday morning for essential things like going to the paint store and getting samples. Michael went to the grocery store. I asked him to pick up a few things I forgot and he came home without any chicken breasts because they were completely sold out.

We watched the local news, the Weather Channel, and our phones to keep track of it all. There was not a moment this weekend when we weren’t aware of the weather conditions, the road conditions, school closings, store closings, work closings. Yesterday when I turned on the tv to watch my favorite Sunday morning show, it was wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. Bundled up reporters running their booted feet along icy streets, cutting to another reporter standing next to a pile of snow as a plow rumbled by, cutting back to the studio where the breathless, suited weather guy was so hyped up over the weather you’d think he snorted something every time he was off camera.

Decades after that snowstorm of my youth, I was talking to Mom one day about how different it was back then, how there were no cellphones, nothing more than the six and 10:00 news to know what was going on, how you may have known that it was going to snow but it didn’t cause a city-wide panic and a run on the grocery store. “I was so worried about your dad,” she said, “that I kept going out to clear the driveway and looking down the street hoping to see his car.”

And all that time I thought the tears we saw on her face when she came in from shoveling was because of the cold.