I admit it. I’m a sucker for blizzards. I suppose that’s because I’ve never had to, you know, live through one.
Tonight, I just might.
Forget the sudden cloud speeding from the northwest. We’ve been hearing about a blizzard expected to strike our area for two days.
I live in Kansas. Southwest Kansas, to be exact–just north of the Oklahoma panhandle and a stone’s throw from Colorado. Nebraska’s all that stands between me and South Dakota, where blizzards, at least in Laura’s time, were plenty. In New England, where I lived for almost three decades, we didn’t have blizzards. We had Nor’easters. They were powerful and piled up the snow, yet they were sort of fluffy and pretty. They’d keep you housebound, but they piled instead of blew. They weren’t combined with driving, blinding winds, at least not for extended periods of time.
The idea of the Little House blizzards fascinated me. You couldn’t even leave your house. Not because the snow was so deep – we certainly were familiar with that problem – but because you couldn’t find your way back! How crazy was that? I used to be so enthralled with The Long Winter and the Indian’s prediction of the winter storms to come. (If you even knew about the hours I spent trying to figure out which winters from 1880 through the present were the seventh seventh winter, convinced it should match up with the historic Boston Blizzard of ‘78.) I was jealous that my state, for some reason, didn’t get blizzards like Laura saw. I wanted to see them. I wanted to know what it was like to look outside and see nothing but swirling whiteness. I wanted to feel that wind, for even just a moment. I wanted to hear the snow against the window and scratch a peephole in the frosted glass.
When I moved to Kansas, just one state separating me from South Dakota, I realized I now lived on a treeless plain like the ones Laura described. As my first winter approached, I casually quizzed my husband, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice: “So do you get blizzards here?” He said he’d seen one or two as a kid, but not in years. The ones he remembered, though, were brutal. Even though you knew the blizzard rules – don’t go out, don’t leave your car – people sometimes decided they knew better. And in a few cases where people gambled on the blizzard, the blizzard won. He’d actually known people who’d gotten lost and never made it home.
Tonight the four of us — me plus my husband and my two children — will not leave the house. Fingers crossed, we will not lose power. The wind has been screeching all day, and this is what the National Weather Service’s page about our area says we can expect overnight, under the delicious heading “Blizzard Warning”:
...MAJOR WINTER STORM MOVING IN LATE TONIGHT AND FRIDAY...
.ABUNDANT MOISTURE WILL RETURN TO SOUTHWEST KANSAS TONIGHT AND
FRIDAY AS AN STRONG UPPER LEVEL STORM SYSTEM MOVES OUT OF NEW
MEXICO AND INTO WESTERN TEXAS. THIS WILL RESULT IN A SIGNIFICANT
WINTER STORM ACROSS SOUTHWEST KANSAS LATE TONIGHT AND CONTINUING
THROUGH EARLY SATURDAY. SNOWFALL AMOUNTS WILL RANGE FROM 8 TO 16
INCHES WITH LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS...ESPECIALLY NEAR THE OKLAHOMA
BORDER. STRONG WINDS OF 30 TO 40 MPH WITH HIGHER GUSTS TO 50 MPH
WILL PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW AS WELL AS
VISIBILITIES LESS THAN ONE QUARTER MILE
Less than a quarter mile visibility? It isn’t as good as Pa’s hand in front of his face, but I’ll take it.
I’m waiting for my blizzard.
I once saw a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, near Lake Tahoe (where the Donner Party encountered their gruesome fate). While I am used to seeing snow up there each winter, the blizzard was amazing, with snow falling and blowing so thick that we could not even see the house across the street from the house where we were staying. I was so thankful to be inside, and I could really understand the Gold Rush legends of people who got lost in a blizzard and were found dead about five feet from their front doors. They couldn’t even see it. Good luck with your blizzard. Stay inside and be safe! And read a little Long Winter to keep you company.
I hope to experience a blizzard from a safe viewing point one day. Being from the South, I have only seen a half-dozen really good snows in my 53 years. The best one was when I was about 10, it snowed almost a foot. We had a icy hill in front of our house and I had my first and only sled ride. It is amazing how fast you can go.
Enjoy your blizzard.
I hope you don’t lose power. Get out your copy of The Long Winter and sit by a window to read it. We’re expecting 3-5 inches of snow tomorrow night here in Southern, IL. It won’t be a blizzard, but I’ll still enjoy it.
I hope you came through this blizzard safely!
I am in northern Colorado, and we were whomped with this blizzard yesterday. While (foolishly) driving in it, I realized that visibility was terrible–this gave me the biggest rush! Why? Because I thought back to the blizzards described in “The Long Winter”, and was in some small way imagining what it was like for Laura’s family back then. Silly, I know, but it put a huge smile on my face, even as I negotiated frightful roads in a fairly inadequate minivan.
I felt the same curiosity you did about blizzards while I read the books growing up. But I grew up in HAWAII! No chance for a blizzard there. And now I live in Los Angeles. I lived in Seattle for a year, but the worst that happened was gentle snowfall two or three times in the winter.
I’m still curious.