I couldn’t sleep a wink with this storm. The wind’s blowing so hard around the house that I don’t see how it’s still standing. There’s the gusts coming in on one side and the snow heaping up on the other that’s got the walls in a vise. Lord knows how I’ll make my way out when it’s all past.
The first time I weathered a storm here, it was two days before I could get outside. There was a good five feet of snow in front of the door, and those window shutters I’d been foolish enough to shut weren’t opening. “Rookie mistake,” Benedict said later on. I might be an old man, but I still had to climb up to the attic and come down through the dormer with a rope. That wasn’t easy going. I popped my shoulder out on the way down, and I still had to shovel snow with my good arm before I could find something to keep the other one where it belonged. This time I decided I’d clear as much as I could around the house, maybe that’d be enough.
Staying alive isn’t something you can just figure out as you go. Where I come from, nobody has to wonder if snow’s going to shut them in. There’s no snow, not one flake, and if I had the choice, with these joints of mine, I’d sooner be there than in this place. The cold, the damp—that’s no good for this old body. That’d really be something, to have lived through everything I did only to die now, rotting like a moldy old branch.
What am I doing here, anyhow? I reckon if He’s bent on us meeting and on me being buried at the end of the world, then He has His reasons for it. He knows I’m a sinner, but if God in all His mercy has a plan for me, then I’ll wait on the answers. I’m frozen, and I’ll still wait as long as I have to. Lord knows, I don’t have much say in the matter.