Waiting

It’s a cold, gray Monday. I have food. I have candles and kerosene in case the electric power goes out. Nothing to do now but wait.

The overnight low was supposed to be 8°F. It was 16°F when I checked this morning. Now it’s half past noon and the temperature has warmed to 22°F. That’s it; that’s going to be the high for the day.

The cold weather began moving in Saturday night with winds blowing 30 mph and gusting to 40 mph here and to 50 mph a few miles away. About 8,500 people lost electric power due to tree limbs falling on power lines, and occasionally a tree would blow over and land on a house. The local news showed an apartment building with a downed tree slicing through its roof. The tree cut through 3 bedrooms in that building.

The snow is supposed to start around 10 o’clock tonight and drop 5 to 8 inches of the white stuff on the city. The temperature has been in the 20s for days, so the ground is frozen hard and everything that falls will stick. The forecasters say that toward morning the snow will change to sleet. Lovely.

It could be worse. I could still be living in Roanoke, Virginia. One snowy winter I took this photo of cars in front of my apartment building. That, as I recall, was 15 - 20 inches of snow. My friend CyberDave still lives in the Roanoke area. He probably says, “It could be worse. I could still be living in West Virginia.” Bluefield averages 34 inches of snow annually, but there are places along the spine of the Allegheny Mountains that average over 100 inches per year.

Frozen pipes are a concern, too. My house has survived many cold winter nights, but the temperature normally doesn’t get into the single digits at night and low 20s during the day and stay there. The word used by the local TV station’s meteorologist to described this weather: “unprecedented.”

So I’m waiting. I see snow-shoveling in my future.