General

I Was There

There it was. Wet… White… Cold… Silent… Sparkling… Floating… Descending… Blanketing.

Building Up. Enveloping Everything. Gorgeous but Dangerous. Beautiful but Destructive. Blizzard Snow.

It was all of the above.

It was historic.

It was the Blizzard Of 1978.

I was there. Me. The one who can never get warm enough until summer. I was there at the beginning on a hilly, curvy road in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains during a blizzard, at night.

What a sight I must have been. Hanging my head out the car window trying frantically to see the edge of the road where the grass was barely peeking through the quickly accumulating snow. My sister, who was driving, could not make out the painted lines in the middle of the road because the snow was falling in thick, blinding sheets. So there I was trying to navigate for her. Steady now. A little to your left. Back right because I’ve lost sight of the grass at the edge.

I was there. Riding shotgun with my head out the car window for two hours on a journey that would normally have taken twenty minutes.

Yes, I was there for the Blizzard of ’78. I was there for two more months before renting a trailer to pull behind my car, packing up my belongings and heading south — a thousand miles south of the Blizzard of ’78.