Snowbound

The next morning, we waken to a muted light. It’s like being inside an ice cave. We can’t see anything out any of the windows except swirling snow. The maples at the edge of the lawn have become grey brushwork, steel-wool scrapings in the white-out. The wind still pummels the house, still rages down from the northeast.

When we go downstairs we find the cats pressed against the glass door, their whiskers frosted, their mouths open in piteous mews that we can’t hear. When I open the door to let them in, the vast roar and twisting whine of the wind is suddenly in our kitchen, and snow blows onto the geraniums.

The radio tells us that a low pressure system is stalled over the Maritimes.

I go outside to tend the animals in the barn. I pull my hood up. The plastic toggle on the drawstring whips in the wind, hits me in the eye. I lean on the wind and watch my feet coming forward and forward, the only colour in the whiteness. Already, between the house and the barn, there’s a drift deeper than my knees.

In the barn, snow sifts through cracks in the north wall. The horse and the pony have snow on their eyelashes, on their coarse manes, and in the grooves along their spines. They move restlessly about their stalls; the black mare tosses her nose impatiently. I brush snow off the hay bales, fill their mangers. When I stamp back into the boot-hall, I’m panting, my face is wind-whipped, dripping wet. I lean forward and shake snow out of my hair.

I spend most of the day curled in the corner of the couch, reading, drinking tea. Hours pass with no change in the intensity of the snow or the wind. We go to the windows, report to one another on the drifts which grow wherever the wind is checked. Snow streams steadily off the crest of the drifts, and their knife-edge lips become sharper and thinner, then begin to curl like fortune cookies.

By late afternoon, the weather forecasters are predicting the biggest storm in fifty years.

The house hums with current: the refrigerator and the freezer whir, hot air pulses from the ducts, music plays from the stereo. Nonetheless, we search through drawers for candles and stick them into whatever we can find — beer bottles, glass jars. I rummage in the pantry for kerosene lamps and place the box of “strike anywhere” matches on the kitchen table. We fill the tub with water. Just in case.

At seven o’clock we lose power. It is a swift failing. One minute the house is humming, ticking, clocks keeping track of time, electronic seconds pulsing on the VCR, we’re spinning through the storm in our spaceship, warm, comfortable, and then the lights shut down, not the way they go when you click them off, but a swoop, a diminishment. A failure. A power failure.

First there is the darkness. It is pitch dark. Then there is the absence of any sound but the wind and the flicking of snow against the windows. I see the line of red light around the lid of the cookstove, hear the quiet snap of the fire. I pick up the telephone, but it is dead. A piece of white plastic in my hand.

We light the candles. Shadows flicker on the walls as candle flames leap and shrink in the cold drafts. The only heat comes, now, from the kitchen stove, and the rest of the house gets cold, rapidly. It’s quiet, so quiet — there are no distractions. Only the reflection of candles in the windows, the snapping of the fire and the unceasing rage of the storm, the wild howl and moan, the rampaging of the wind.

All of us, mother, father, son, dog, and two cats, come to the kitchen. We come to the room where there is fire. By the stove are two buckets of water and a ladle. Steam wheezes gently from the kettle’s spout. We bring a book and pass it around, taking turns reading out loud. Often we stop to listen to the storm.

Nothing compels us to do anything else. Nothing pulls us, fractures us.

We wavered when the power died, caught in actions half-completed, all our choices gone. In that instant, we were people in amber, caught between times; and now we return to something barely conceivable. People without power.

There’s a particularly heavy buffet of wind, and the house shudders on its foundation.

Our senses are shaken awake, to shadows, shelter, measured words. To one another. The storm holds us; we have no control over our situation, and yet we are not diminished but wrapped in the mystery of wind, of fire, of water in a bucket.

The boundary vanishes. We cross the threshold, and glimpse how we, too, are part of the night’s world, the storm’s song.

Nothing is so freeing as being snowbound.