Surprise!

I opened the door to leave for class this morning and found flurries coming down. A little more snow, I thought. Off I strode. But by the time I made it to the corner, I realized that this snow was all sticking--and that the road was covering over.

By the time I came out of class an hour later, it was snowing harder. I came home through the snow and had my lunch here in the bright, warm kitchen. (And I took some pictures of what was coming, because I already knew I was leaving the camera behind, rather than taking it out again in what was coming down so hard.) By the time I trudged back to campus for my second class of the day (the second largest of my career!), inches had piled up.

The snow kept on until long after I came home tonight. Sometime in the early evening, largely because the windchill is supposed to be so severe starting tonight (stated high temperature for tomorrow: 4º F; windchill tomorrow night -25º F), campus security had e-mailed to tell us to walk with friends, or to call someone if we were setting out on our own. So, before I left the officehouse, I called my flaming-sworded friend and her husband to alert them. No one was quite sure what was supposed to have happened next had I not shown up. "I figured, I'll just take the same route home I always take," I told them once I was back. "And that way, if I fall over, at least I'll be somewhere predictable."

Before I turned the corner toward home, I stopped short in the road near a streetlight, and there, before and all around me, were the falling shadows of the flakes floating to the ground all around me, there in all that evening silence.