Snow Day

It’s still April, but barely.

In the dark of the earliest hours of the 30^th, I wake to pitch dark and silence.

Unusually dark and silent.

Electricity’s out.

I try to go back to sleep—the conditions are ideal, after all—but disturbing thoughts about the possible cause of a power outage insert themselves. What steals into my no-longer-sleepy brain are not the scenarios that have become increasingly plausible in America’s West, of a preemptive shutdown designed to prevent a utility-related wildfire ignition, or a wildfire itself. Instead, my restlessly paranoid thoughts are of Armageddon. I toy, more than once in the ensuing hours, with the idea of getting up to see if Pikes Peak is backlit by the glow of a firestorm ignited by a nuclear strike on Colorado Springs (Sorry, dear friends in Colorado Springs. We must get together soon). My brain, it seems, has been jotting notes from my tightly regulated forays into non-local news.

Had I gotten up, I wouldn’t have seen a lurid glow, and not just because nobody is bombing the country at this time. The horizon—all of it, regardless of direction, including to the northeast where Pikes Peak routinely hunkers—is socked in with cloud. In the monochrome pre-dawn of 5:26 a.m., when I do finally get up and find my phone, it becomes clear that the likely explanation for our outage is snow-laden tree limbs snapping and bringing down power lines. The half-inch of snow in last evening’s local forecast has multiplied itself more than ten times over.

Doug gets busy fetching wood and crumpling paper to build a fire; the heat has been off since before midnight, and it’s chilly. I swipe the matches from him to light a few candles and a burner on the gas cooktop, putting on water for tea.

It occurs that my silly brain can be forgiven for not realizing that the electricity might have failed for snow-related reasons. We’ve barely had any of the white stuff this winter. In fact, if the forecast holds and more snow falls overnight, this will be the biggest snowfall event to hit our area since November of 2024.

Here’s hoping, for the sake of the birds, that the flowers on the smooth currants are tough enough to withstand the coming cold.

When Doug comes back from feeding the horses, I’m sitting in front of the fire. There’s plenty I can—should—be doing, but I don’t wanna. This feels like something other than the usual instinct for procrastination.

It’s been so warm this winter we’ve hardly used the fireplace. In a “normal” year, we build a fire almost every evening from November through March, and keep one burning all day long on days when it’s snowing or cold and cloudy. This past March, I threw windows open more often than I built a fire.

I want a snow day. Declaring a snow day signals a desire to be inside, by the fire. A snow day means reading takes precedence over work. A snow day is cozy and indulgent. It is nothing like a wind day, which we’ve had plenty of lately. Wind days are aggravation and a sense of forced confinement.

I always want to play hooky when it’s snowing, but the inclination is particularly strong today. I eventually track the impulse down to the wash of relief that hit at 5:27 this morning, when I looked outside and saw so much more snow than I expected. The wet is a stay, however temporary, against the creeping tension of a wildfire season that promises to be long and fierce. One storm doesn’t break a drought, and a couple of snowy days won’t hold red flag warnings at bay for long. But this morning the sense of release is powerful, and it inclines me to settle in the chair near the fireplace, feet up on the ottoman, book in hand. The irony of feeling so powerfully drawn to fire as a break from worrying about fire is not lost on me.

Rhubarb on the way to losing its insulating blanket.

Doug has appointments in town, though, and he leaves. A snow day is less fun alone. As the log in the fireplace burns down toward ash, I finish a page in my journal. Rather than adding more wood to encourage the embers back toward flame, I get dressed and go for a walk. The snow is practically gone off the roads already. The ground is so dry the slop of mud and slush won’t last long.

I throw the juncos some birdseed and the horses a flake of hay. The latter have been shedding, are practically down to slick summer coats. We’ll keep the hay rations stepped up, stoking their internal furnaces. They have shelters, and it’s not supposed to be windy. Harper will be outraged at the temperatures the next two nights, but she’s going to be happy when this moisture brings on the grass at last.

I putter in my office, tinkering on this piece. I tidy the kitchen and bring in wood, more than we’ll need this evening. We have nowhere to go tomorrow, and with luck the snow will still be coming down when we wake up.