Rainy Days and October Snow Days

If snow in October is going to be the next big thing in New York, I’m going to have to pass. As it stands, winter in New York already monopolizes a good six months of the year. If we’re going to tack on an extra two months it changes the ratio from unbearably cold half of the time to unbearably cold two thirds of the time, and with fractions like that I may as well live in Alaska. Which, let’s be clear, I never could.

We had houseguests from England last week, and after a morning tour of the always-fabulous New York State Museum, I took them on a brisk and windy lap of the Empire State Plaza. A lap that chilled our bones and left us looking pale and red-nosed in the photos outside the Capitol building and the strangely-shaped but infamous Egg, so I gave them the remaining tour of New York’s fine Capital by car. From this vantage point we caught our first glimpse of the tent city that’s popped up opposite City Hall as home to the dedicated souls of Occupy Albany. And then yesterday, after this first hideously early snowfall of the year, headlines were marveling at the protestors’ gumption, both upstate and down, in brushing off the snow to stick it out. Politics aside, with snow in the picture and only canvas between them and the stars, it’s hard to have anything but admiration for such dedication and resolve.

It appears New York’s weather hasn’t always been so contrary, (except for that little patch back in 1987), unless our day to day expectations have been twisted by the crystal ball gazing of television meteorologists. Nonetheless, my years in upstate New York seem to have coincided with some sort of meteorological adolescent turmoil. Here, it’s easy to spend six months of the year in a euphoria of warm weather relief and Vitamin D-ecstacy during which time you kid yourself into believing the winters aren’t so bad and the likelihood of a power outage pretty slim. But beside the predictable several feet of snow and sub-zero temperatures that take up the other half the year, recent winters have included freak weather conditions that recalled individually are memorable. Taken together, I can’t help but wonder why I couldn’t have closed my eyes and stuck a pin in Miami or Honolulu.

Over the past eight years we’ve battened the hatches against gale force winds that smashed the outdoor dining table, tossed the chairs in the bushes like a drunk hooligan, and skewered the sun umbrella in blackberry briars half an acre away. There were the mini tornados that ricocheted around town and touched down close enough to siphon up a local store’s lawn tractors and scatter them across fields like candy. We hunkered down in ice storms that glazed our cars like doughnuts, snapped limbs off crystallized trees, downed solid power lines and burned at least one house to the ground. And there was the year we spent a five-day power outage relentlessly stuffing logs into the red-hot woodstove and sleeping, colonial-style, huddled together on a mattress in front of the heat source. Oh, the glamour of reading by spelunking headlights, the culture shock of almost a week without the Internet, telephone or TV, and the naïveté of friends who always ask why we didn’t go to a hotel. For the last time, if the fire went out the pipes would freeze.

Given the extreme weather makeover, my husband has been after a generator. But with our mild weather amnesia, it finally took a summertime hurricane to justify the expense. When Irene finally made her way up to New York, my husband was in line at Lowes at 6am, first to greet the final pre-storm shipment of generators. Let me just put this in print: the generator has paid for itself in spades. I don’t know what I may have asked for Christmas this year but I’ll accept the generator with a side of humble pie. With four large trees down, one hanging on the power lines for three days, the generator had plenty of play. Power outages in the winter aren’t much fun but at least the contents of the freezer do well outside. Lose power in the summer and you can’t even keep a pint of milk cold.

In the grand scheme of things, last weekend’s pre-Halloween snowstorm wasn’t so bad. Our power outage lasted less than twenty-four hours, the generator handled the lights and the fridge-freezer, and we spent a curious Sunday sledding in the morning sunshine and making snowmen before buying cornstalks, carving pumpkins and hopping on a Halloween hayride. I’ll take the novelty in stride the same way I consider my mastery of the snow blower a new life skill. I’m just hoping someone in New York’s current administration is fast-tracking that statewide Climate Change Action Plan. 2050 is looking an awfully long way off. Perhaps I should wait to see how the rest of this winter goes before clicking my heels together and whispering, “Cuomo, I’ve a feeling we’re not in New York anymore.”