Yesterday was a storm day

Yesterday was a storm day, or it was supposed to be a storm day, with weather people telling us all about ice pellets, freezing rain warnings, and heavy rainfall warnings, the kind of storm we often see here on the Atlantic Coast, where the line between the colder part of the system and the warmer part passes right over us and where it's really hard to predict which way the weather will go. If you add to that the possibility of the system stalling over us, you have reason to take heed, fill the bathtub and pots and jugs in case we lose our power and know where the candles and matches and headlamps and battery radio are. Which of course we did. And we got up really early because L. was teaching an 8:30 class and we wanted to check for cancellations. It turned out that pretty well every school in the mainland was closed all day, but the universities stayed open, I think because university students and teachers are tough -- as my friend Duygu who studies at Wellesley told me, they seem to take their school motto, "women who will", more seriously than they need to, as they also stayed open, along with brave Harvard and MIT, through their very snowy version of the same storm.

It wasn't clear early in the day what the storm was going to do, but the precipitation (freezing drizzle was how the weather office described it) seemed to have stopped when I went out. I did have to break my non-idling rule and let the car run for ten minutes before I could even start to clear the windows of their thick encrustation of ice (that really is the word for what we had, which was like a 1 cm thick scab on the windshield, though it still sounds to me more like some variety of lobster) so that L. could head in to the school. Being male and protective, I wanted to drive her, but she persuaded me it was better that I stay at home, so I got to just watch the weather reports, feed the woodstove, post a blog, and watch the storm.

When I think of a storm, I think of turbulence, sturm und drang, as well as whatever forms of precipitation it offers, but this one was remarkably quiet. Perhaps it was because of the "stall" factor they had talked about. There seemed to be little wind, and freezing drizzle is one of the gentlest of processes, just an imperceptible accumulation or accrual or, even better, accretion, of clear ice on cold surfaces, like cars and flagstones and pine needles and bare twigs. For us it was a tender storm, the trees outside my window standing still, collecting their clear casings of ice, and gradually bending forward with the weight. Even when the freezing rain started in earnest, it just seemed to fall straight, and the branches drooped more but barely swayed, even though large waves were crashing around the lighthouse at Mauger's Beach across the harbour.

I didn't see any branches break, the air gradually warmed, and our power lines stayed intact. At one point I heard a crash on the other side of the house, but when I went to look I couldn't see anything at all. A bit later I caught a glimpse of something white dropping fast, but again there was no sign of where it came from or went. My dream of course was that a goshawk or peregrine had dived or a snowy owl swooped, but then I noticed the icicles dripping and a thin sheet of ice sliding down off our fascia. Things were thawing and letting go, as happens in this pattern of a storm. All we needed once that started was the heavy rain to start and wash the accumulation of granular ice pellets away before the storm moved off to Newfoundland.

Later today, perhaps, when the arctic cold sweeps in from Quebec the way it does after a storm, we might get a solid enough freeze for some skating or something. In this uncertain climate you have to grab whatever opportunity you can. We will keep our skates in the car and hope.