Hey, it's pretty late

I'm heading up into The Northern Gothic tomorrow afternoon and so naturally being the OC individual that I am I had to clean my apartment, spic and span, top to bottom before departing, even though its for only a few days, shorter if I get a migraine like I sometimes do, longer if global warming abates and the winter blizzard typical this time of year, like the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, waylays me just like it waylaid my mom and dad at the hospital the year my sister was born. It was...1983 I think. Or 1984. I could do that math if I wanted to. I was six years old and my mom and dad had been gone for quite some time--I was staying next door with my grandmother...her house had a large bay window, which she called a picture window, that looked out onto the dirt road we lived on, the view interceded by a large oak. On the day my parents promised that they would return, a blizzard blew through, dumping three feet of snow on us, followed by a night of relentless nor'easter wind that scalloped snow up to the roofs in graceful arcs. Snow was so much more plentiful prior to 1998. The parents didn't come and I took it personally, as one at that age is wont to do. I was staying with grandma and the drifts were too high; we couldn't trudge next door to visit my home, the home I thought had been abandoned by my parents.

No snow in sight this time.