February has always in my mind contained a “false spring.”  I must have heard the phrase in Iowa, decades back, where a lull in the harshness of winter, where as newly arrived graduate students, we were told that temperatures could freeze eyelashes, created a sense of spring.  Somehow I imagine forsythia blooming, but I am really thinking of March or April in a mild global warming (it has been happening for years) when the bright yellow flowers played up so against the patches of snow, and tufts of green grass.

Here in the northeast of the united states, we had a paroxysm of blizzard, wind shutting power grids which still have not been righted.  A cab driver told me he slept in his closet during the frigid temperatures with a camp-stove.

But now the ice is melting.  chunks of snow fall from the roof, and birds are singing again.  A squirrel comes to inspect what she can, and I have propped open a screened window for some fresh air.

I think of the TV series Northern Exposure when they once had an episode about the actual spring thaw, when if I am remembering correctly, libido was released in a frenzy.

Valentine’s Day is approaching.  A day whose ideal more than anything to give love, and give more love. Keep on giving, and try again when you recognize you still have not let go of those old patterns of a bittered heart.  Tell yourself,there is no use in bitterness, except as one of the seven or is it five senses of taste.  Just give love, and give more love.

All in all, it was just twenty-four hours without power or heat.  Frigid cold though.  How much I take for granted.

The snow covered all the windows completely, except for a few small streaks to peer through.

The wind rattled my home so fiercely I realized that the way my unit was shaped, I lived in a treehouse.

At times I thought the roof would blow off.

I wandered downstairs, but went back up, carrying my flashlight.

I tried to read by candlelight ( appropriately, Ancient Light by John Banville), then by flashlight.

The folks who built the fancy stationary goods company made their fortune, deservedly, with tiny reading book lights.

After the storm, which raged two days, mounds of snow were left.  Mounds, like soft vanilla ice cream, like Ponds lotion in a tub, like snow.

The snow plow came by four times.

Indira Ganesan, Snow Cover, 2012

I exchanged my early morning volunteer radio program to teach.  My first class was Wednesday, January 16, during a mini snowstorm.  Friends drove me to class in a loaner Mercedes, as the trees alongside the highway were painted with white swirl.  We found our way back on the main road after one exploratory exit that did not quite pan out, and made it on time.  I fumbled quite a bit with the seatbelt release as snow fell all around, and my friends were in stitches with laughter.  A flurry of hugs, and I hurried to collect the syllabus in one building, and raced to class in another.

Waxing eloquent, I thought, I bade the students look outside through the classroom window at the landscape, thinking to remark that the numerous tree stumps were transformed by the snow to resemble gravestones. In fact, they were gravestones, the students gently told me; our class looked over a graveyard.  Joyce, I said quickly, think about Joyce, and “The Dead.”

It is a gift and honor to teach again, to have conversation again on the subject of story.

My friends picked me up, and after dinner, arrived back home eighteen hours later after we first set out. I was exhausted in the way my old college friend Sue once described exhaustion: a good hard-earned tiredness that came after a full day out teaching.  She was describing the hard task of teaching secondary school.

A few weeks later, another snowstorm.  This one caught me unaware, and I drove inch by inch in wild snow last Monday night, trying to see as far as the headlights would allow, finding that if I turned on the  high beam lights, the snowfall was much more terrifying to look at.  E.L.Doctorow said we write in the dark, seeing only as much as headlights allow, slowly moving forward until we are home.  A trip that would have taken an hour took me two, terrified of skidding, aware I was holding up traffic behind me, blasting my music to quell my fears, until an ambulance and pick up passed me, covering my window with sludge.  How on earth had I not known an ambulance was behind me?

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