Various Storms

Last week was a week of storms. At the start of the week, it was a solar storm. High intensity solar winds were predicted to light the night sky with auroras on Monday and Tuesday nights. Later in the week it was a polar storm predicted to bring us ice and snow and subzero temperatures. We waited and watched and the week rolled by.

Activity on the sun causing the solar storm.

The center dot is the sun, the green dot is the earth. The colored bands are solar energy.

Monday was about as Monday-ish as a day can get. It was 8° when I got up. It was dark. It was snowing. When the sun came up I could hardly tell. The sky was overcast the whole day and it was gray and dismal. But I had a project to work on to keep me busy through the day. I put on a long queue of Bach and set to work. Stacey decided that, in honor of the nation's semiquincentennial, we should compile information on our ancestors who participated in the Revolutionary War. I knew of some of them, but didn't have all their information gathered into one document. That's what I worked on that day. Using various amazing resources online, I searched out information on the generation of my family that was alive at the time of the Revolution. It was fascinating. I started out with sixteen kinsman that I already had some information on and went from there, adding specifics of their service, stories of their sacrifice. By the end of my research that day, I had twenty-three kinsman all together. Some of them had pretty interesting stories. One was captured by Indians and lived with them for two years before escaping. Some of them fought in important battles. One of them, four year old Susannah Rice, got to sit on George Washington's lap while he rested with his troops at their family's farm during his retreat from the Battle of Brandywine. Some of them gave their lives. I love family history.

The sky did clear later in the day on Monday, but that's because arctic air was moving in. By sundown it was 6° and dropping. There were reports of Northern Light sightings in the area. We went out just before bedtime to see if we could see anything. There was a faint glow to the north, but nothing spectacular. 

A very faint aurora.

Tuesday morning at dawn it was -3°. There was a brisk wind blowing which dropped the wind chill to -20°. The air was hazy with ice crystals. I spent the morning hovering between the furnace grate and the heater by my desk. I didn't want to go out in the cold, but I had to. Miriam was in school that day and I had to drive her there because I needed the car to go to a haircut appointment. School had a two hour delay because of the cold, but the delay didn't make any difference. It was still just as cold at 9:30 as it was at 7:30. After my haircut, I drove up to Wellsville to check the chapel and make sure there were no frozen or broken pipes. All was well there. While I was in town, I went to the library to pick up a book I ordered, the recently published posthumous book by Harper Lee, Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays.

I approached reading this book with a bit of trepidation. I love Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. I consider it one of the masterpieces of American literature. I've read it many times. After To Kill A Mockingbird came out in 1960, people waited for Harper Lee to publish another book, but one never came. She became something of a recluse. Her older sister Alice acted as her protector and insisted that she wanted no other works to be published. Alice died in 2014. When they announced in 2015 that they were publishing a new book (it was actually written before Mockingbird) called Go Set A Watchman, many were concerned. They thought that, with Alice now gone, the publishers were taking advantage of Harper Lee. Despite the controversy, I preordered the book and waited in anticipation. When it arrived, I read it, and I hated it. It tells a tale involving the same characters in To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, but it is set in a later time and the characters are so different as to almost seem the opposite of their earlier selves. No wonder Harper Lee never wanted it to be published. It undoes so much of what Mockingbird is beloved for. I did not give the book a place on my shelves, but donated it to the library when I was done with it.

I'd just finished the Discworld book I was reading and hadn't moved on to the next one yet, so I took a pause and read The Land of Sweet Forever. It only took me a few days to finish it. It contains eight short stories and eight essays and miscellaneous pieces. The eight stories are all early works, predating To Kill A Mockingbird and elements of that book can be found in some of them. The essays and other pieces in this book were mostly written post Mockingbird. In all, I enjoyed the book. Some of the stories were beautifully written, on a par with Mockingbird. The essays were interesting and some were even profound. I will add this book to my library and set it next to Harper Lee's masterpiece, which will always be To Kill A Mockingbird.

We had another faint aurora on Tuesday night.

It was even colder on Wednesday morning, -10°, but the wind had died down, so there was no wind chill. Even so, it was cold enough to discourage me from going out to watch a pretty sunrise. I watched it through the front windows.

Sunrise through the front windows.

I needed something bright and buoyant that morning so I turned, as I often do, to Mozart's piano concertos. He wrote twenty seven of them beginning with No. 1 in F Major, written in 1767 when he was 11, to No. 27 in B-flat Major, written in 1791, the year he died at the age of 35. This time, I started with No. 12 in A Major, written in 1782 when we was 26 years old, and went all the way to the last one. I place these piano concertos near the very top of my favorite music list. They never fail to please me.

Early in the week we started hearing mixed predictions for bad weather arriving over the weekend. The forecasts ran the gamut from dire warnings of an icy apocalypse to it's nothing to worry about. Over the days, the predicted zones of heavy snow and ice shifted back and forth, north and south. They warned of possible power outages, perhaps lasting for days. We were told to refrain from travelling Saturday to Monday. In my experience, the more dire the predictions, the less chance there is of them happening, but it pays to be prepared in case they are actually right this time. So we started preparing. Hannah brought more wood onto the back porch. I stacked wood by the stove in the living room. I made sure we had charged batteries in the flashlights. I cleaned and then put oil in our kerosene lanterns. I drove into town on Friday and stocked up on chicken feed. We made sure the cars had full tanks of gas. Water is always our biggest concern should the power go out. I filled buckets of water for the chickens and set them in the music room under the plant shelves. I filled pitchers of water for us to drink. I filled the downstairs bathtub with water to use for flushing toilets. I felt ready for whatever was going to happen.

This was the forecast on Thursday.

On Friday it shifted to this.

It was hard to believe on Friday that a storm was coming. It was very cold, but the sky was clear and the sun was shining brightly. I ran all my errands and did all my chores and enjoyed the sunshine. I felt justified in my skepticism about the accuracy of the forecast. Sometimes I think the food stores collude with the forecasters to create a buying panic. The store shelves quickly empty of certain items – bread, eggs, milk, and toilet paper. It's as if the storms are a cause for a French Toast Festival.

My biggest worry going into this storm was church. I'm the one who has to decide whether or not to cancel services. I hesitated to be hasty. If I canceled and the storm turned out to be nothing, it meant a wasted Sunday. If I didn't cancel and the storm turned out to be bad, I didn't want people feeling like they needed to try and get to church. Several other churches had already announced cancellations on Thursday. I watched the forecasts and waited. By Friday afternoon most churches in the area were cancelling their meetings. I made a decision that afternoon and sent out the word that church was canceled. Better safe than sorry.

Around afternoon chore time on Friday the weather began to change. The bright clear sky turned gray. The wind, which was already intense, grew stronger. And a fine dusty snow began to swirl down. The tracks I left in the snow going down to the barn were gone without a trace as I came back. It reminded me of the stories in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter where they had to string a rope between their house and barn to hold on to so they wouldn't get lost. It wasn't that bad, but it felt like it could get that way pretty quickly. We had dinner at the Shillig's that evening, delicious Mexican food, a perfect finish for a cold winter day. That night, we stoked the woodstove and set the faucets dripping before we went to bed.

Yesterday morning when I got up it was -18 with a wind chill of -23. That set a record for the coldest it had been so far this year. A record soon to be broken. The sunrise was brief and pretty. I watched it from the front windows again. I wasn't about to go outside. I dressed for the day in thermal underwear, flannel lined clothing, my fleecy hoodie, and wooly socks – and that was for indoors. We managed to keep the woodstove going through the night, but even with that, the furnace came on repeatedly. Nights that cold with no frozen pipes always feel like a triumph.

Saturday sunrise.

Saturday, the colors shift again.

It was a lazy sort of day, as any day that cold on the front edge of a winter storm should be. After a late breakfast/early lunch, upstairs the feminine portion of the household worked on making valentines while making their way through Pride and Prejudice and Wives and Daughters. Downstairs, I parked myself in front of the woodstove with Harper Lee and a bit of intermittent dozing, but could only nap in short stretches so as to keep the stove fed. I did the chores early and gave the chickens and guineas extra feed in case I didn't feel like going down on Sunday after the storm had set in.

Upstairs.

Downstairs.

I waited for this storm with mixed feelings. There was still some deep childish remnant in my brain that thought it would be exciting. To wake up in the morning to a world buried in snow, the disruption it causes to all the regular schedules we live by – it made me feel like a kid anticipating school cancellations and sledding and making a snow fort. But at the same time, the mature and rational part of me (maybe old is a better but more brutal term) dreaded waking up to a world buried in snow and the disruption it causes to all the regular schedules we live by. There was a time when digging out of a few feet of snow would have been no big deal. Not anymore. Now even just walking from the house to the barn to do chores through deep snow is dreadful, exhausting, dangerous even. Where I once would have gleefully plopped down into a drift to make a snow angel, I now shuffle along, afraid tripping and falling in the snow and getting hurt. I went to bed last night with the excitement and the dread swirling around in my head.

The main part of the storm was supposed to arrive sometime around 4:00 a.m. I woke up at midnight, 2:00, and 4:00 and had to get up and look out the windows to see what was going on. At midnight and 2:00 there was no new snow. At 4:00 it didn't look like anything much, maybe a light dusting. I heard a plow go by down on the highway around 6:00. When I got up for the day, it was 3° and snowing, but not hard. As it got light enough to see better, it was snowing steadily and it looked like a couple of inches had accumulated. The childish part of me was disappointed. The mature (old) part of me was relieved. But the day was young and the forecast said the storm was not over yet.

This morning's forecast.

This morning.

The rest of the household took advantage of the church cancellation and slept in. I tiptoed through the quiet house all morning, watching the snow, keeping the woodstove stoked. I decided that, since there was no church, I would do some in depth scripture study. I sat at the dining room table with my Bible, my Sunday School manual, and some study guides spread out before me and spent a couple of hours engrossed in Genesis 3-5 and Moses 4-6, covering The Fall through Enoch – fascinating, fundamental doctrine.

My Sabbath morning study station.

Midmorning the rest of the house began to stir. I could make more noise then, so I loaded up a queue of Tabernacle Choir music. I wanted the day to feel different. This is two weeks without church for me. Last week I was home sick. It really does throw my whole week off to miss church.

The week ahead looks trying. The temperature is not expected to rise much above the single digits. Tomorrow at 14° will be the warmest day of the week and we'll be below zero every night. We will run through our wood supply on the back porch tonight. That means tomorrow I'll have to go out in the cold and bring in more wood. I suppose that's good exercise, but that doesn't make me like it any more. It will be a week of trying to stay warm. And a week of resisting the temptation to gorge myself all day on things I should not eat. Cold weather makes me crave rich, sweet food, exactly the things I'm not supposed to have. I will be strong! But there is the consolation of seeing January finally end this week. Not that February will be any better. It's usually worse. I have to remind myself constantly that every day that passes brings us closer to spring. Unless we enter another Ice Age. That seems possible at this point.