Back in ’94 or ’95, when I was going to school at Ohio State and living in Buckeye Village, we had a winter storm come in. The snow came thick and heavy, huge wet flakes driven horizontally by strong winds. I took my oldest two sons out into the storm and we built a little hut in the drifted bank by the field near the house. I found out on the evening news that we were a couple of degrees "too warm" to have a blizzard.

Tuesday’s storm here wasn’t too warm. Tiny bits of powder blew by in the thirty-mile-an-hour winds with the temperature in the teens. Falling over the thin skim of ice that we got on Monday, the new snow made for incredibly slick and treacherous movement. Randa checked online Tuesday night and found out that we were just under the requisite wind speed of thirty-five-miles-an-hour. The forty-mile-an-hour gusts that night came after the snow had stopped falling. Once again, I’d missed the blizzard.

There were a few million people scattered from Oklahoma to Chicago who weren’t quite under the limit. I’m not sure such keen distinctions really matter to people with power lines torn down by ice, cars stranded by the twenty inches of snow and homes suddenly uninhabitable because of the cold.

A very mild December had us thinking we were going to get a reprieve from the record colds and tons of snow that last winter showed us. This morning’s minus ten and drifts two and three feet deep in the yard have us thinking otherwise. I’m not in a really receptive mood for any arguments about global warming.

That’s one of the dangers of human nature: it’s pretty easy to be minimally concerned about the rain forests when you’re worried that you won’t be able to make it back up your own icy driveway.

Sometimes we have to force ourselves to look beyond our own immediacy. Otherwise, we sacrifice our future because now seems so much more important.

H. Arnett

2/3/11