We are spending today at home, mostly inside the house which, at this moment, is comfortably warm and cozy. The “warm and cozy” could change at any moment as we are under a high wind warning in an area which has a reputation for wind events that knock out the power at least once each winter. 

The terrain outside our windows is white. We had a bit of snow night before last. Not deep, but there’s a layer of ice under it which makes it a bit treacherous for walking. My first experiences of that little layer of ice were humbling. I grew up in Wyoming and prided myself on my ability to get around in the snow, both on foot and by car. But I soon discovered that there’s a reason Northwest drivers are chicken when it comes to driving in the snow: what looks beautiful covers that layer of ice which changes everything. Caution is, in fact, advisable here.

Blizzards are uncommon here, but they were an annual event when I was young. They were exciting (for us kids, not necessarily our parents). No school, for one. For my sister and me, it also meant that we were home with mom while dad was working. He was a railroad engineer and seemed always to be trying to get his passengers from one station to another following behind the snowplow. (My sister and I would not exist were it not for a blizzard in the ‘30s. Dad met mom in the hospital where she was his favorite nurse treating his frostbite from a blizzard misadventure.)

If we couldn’t go out to play, we invented adventures inside the house. We rearranged the furniture, draping blankets over chairs and tables to create tunnels to crawl through. We got out every single board and floor game in the house and played them all. (Tiddly Winks was my personal favorite.) We got to dine on cocoa and toast, still a go-to meal at times of despair. And we fought. Angels we were not. We cannot today figure out how mom survived it all.

Once the winds died down, we could bundle up and work our way out of the house. Often, either the front door or the back was blocked by snowdrifts. But the drifts created a unique opportunity for adventure. I remember a year when we could climb a drift all the way to the roof of our house. In ordinary blizzards, the drifts provided instant forts for snowball fights. 

We were blessed in many ways. Power outages were rare for us, even during the worst storms. Dad always survived the storms, even when the train got stuck, though more than once he had to leave the engine and walk to the nearest town to fetch milk for the tiny tots in his care. Mom might even have enjoyed the chaos we created at home. As kids, we were oblivious to the impact of the storms on the world around us. And such breaks from routine, when they end well, are a valuable part of childhood. These anomalies expand our sense of what’s possible and rev up our problem solving abilities. All good – when they end well.