Give Me a Good Blizzard

I grew up in South Dakota, and spent the greatest part of my adult life in the Chicago area. You know, flat places. Places where you prepare for blizzards by going to the store and buying white things–toilet paper, milk, and bread, regardless of whether you drink milk or eat bread. Places where you prepare for tornadoes by going into the basement and taking along a flashlight and a good book.

By contrast, hurricanes always seemed  alien. Why in the name of God would anyone roll the dice and live so close to the water that his or her home could be wiped out by a hurricane? I was smug about it all.

But here I am, seven-plus years into living in the People’s Republic of Arlington, Virginia, and we’ve got Irene bearing down on us. We’ve had 2 inches of rain in an hour, and tropical storm-force winds. Friends who’ve lived here a long time or further south on the Atlantic or Gulf coasts are scoffing–what’s all the fuss over a category 1 storm? It’s nothing like Andrew or Isabel or Hugo or a bunch of other names with which I am not familiar nor do I care to become familiar.

All I know is there’s something pretty freaky about such detailed preparation for planning to stay put during a hurricane, even one that’s skirting the place I live: clearing off verandas of anything that moves; buying water and batteries because if the power goes, it’s going to be gone a while; getting two pages of instructions from the apartment complex, not to mention robocalls on hurricane safety from insurance companies that don’t even have my business.

And as the wind howls outside my apartment tonight and I’m hoping that the electricity stays on, I’m thinking, give me a good blizzard any day.