Snowpocalypse - A Meditation on Time and Accidental Forests

They’re calling it a snowpocalypse again. Thirteen inches, give or take, depending on which app you trust and how much faith you still place in modern forecasting. Schools are already closed — not cautiously, but preemptively, like a town boarding up for a hurricane that hasn’t yet cleared its throat. Bread and milk have vanished, because tradition is tradition, even if no one remembers why we’re supposed to make emergency French toast.

It’s snowing now. Respectably. Earnestly. The kind of snow that looks impressive on camera but won’t actually strand anyone with a functioning furnace and a moderately stocked pantry. Nothing compared to 1978.

I lived through the Blizzard of ’78. I was eleven or twelve — that precise age where you’re old enough to understand something big is happening, but young enough to feel mostly delighted by it. Snow didn’t fall so much as arrive with authority, like a bill collector who means business. It blew sideways. It erased roads and fences and the idea that adults were fully in charge of things. Cars disappeared. Drifts climbed past mailboxes, past windows, past common sense.

We’d been back in school for maybe three weeks when the storm hit. Just long enough to remember what homework felt like, just short enough that winter break still seemed like yesterday. Then the snow arrived and school closed. And stayed closed.

Two full weeks, maybe more — I’ve lost the exact count to time, but I remember the disbelief that it kept not opening. No one talked about “remote learning” or “instructional minutes” or filed lawsuits about missed standardized tests. The assumption seemed to be that we’d either make it up later or we wouldn’t, and either way, eleven-year-olds would somehow survive not diagramming sentences for a fortnight.

We sledded instead. For hours. Until our mittens froze solid and our cheeks burned and someone’s mom eventually yelled that we were going to catch our death, which never happened, despite repeated warnings spanning three decades.

Time worked differently then. Days were measured in sled runs and hot chocolate, in shoveling just enough to make a path and then giving up because what was the point, really, when another three feet might arrive by morning.

I remember the quiet after the wind finally stopped — a silence so complete it felt intentional, as if the world had decided to pause and see what we’d do with the gift. Mostly we built forts and threw things at each other, which felt like an appropriate response.

The snow was different in ’78, or maybe I was. It seemed heavier somehow, more substantial, the kind of snow that meant what it said. Today’s snow is apologetic by comparison — pretty, photogenic, gone by Tuesday. Back then, snow arrived like it owned the deed to winter and planned to stay until the paperwork cleared. Drifts didn’t melt; they retreated strategically, leaving dirty gray fortifications that lasted until Easter.

Or maybe I’m just old enough now that everything in the past seems more dramatic, more definitive, more real than whatever’s happening in the present. Maybe every generation does this — measures current weather against some mythical storm from their youth, finds it wanting, and uses the comparison to feel briefly important.

Somewhere in that storm — and this may sound like the kind of story towns tell once enough time has passed and no one’s left to fact-check the details — a semi truck overturned on a rural road near a cow pasture. It was hauling walnuts. Unprocessed ones. A million and a half of them, give or take, spilling into the snow like the world’s least practical confetti.

The squirrels, understandably, lost their minds. They buried walnuts everywhere: along fence lines, at the edges of the pasture, in places no one noticed once the snow melted and life resumed and everyone went back to pretending nature was something that happened to other people.

Years later, walnut trees grew where no one had planted them. And decades later still, a subdivision arrived and called itself Walnut Grove, as if it had always been meant to be that way. As if accidents don’t quietly shape the future all the time. As if half our best stories aren’t just footnotes to things we didn’t see coming.

This storm will not do that. Today’s snowpocalypse is gentler, more considerate, aware of its obligations to commerce and schedule. It will come, perform its duty, and leave behind slush and salt-stained boots and roughly fourteen hours of inconvenience before the plows finish their rounds and we all go back to whatever we were doing before the weather had opinions.

I’ll watch it from the window with coffee in hand, my phone buzzing helpfully with hourly updates, warnings, and reassurance that this is normal, expected, managed. I will not feel stranded. I will not feel small.

I will not get two weeks off from responsibility, which feels like a personal failing rather than a societal one. At some point I’ll put on boots I bought specifically for weather I rarely experience and walk to the mailbox to prove something to myself about resilience, then come back inside vaguely disappointed that the adventure took ninety seconds.

The dog will be thrilled, at least. She doesn’t remember 1978 and has no basis for comparison. Every snowfall is the first snowfall, every drift a personal gift from the universe. There’s something to that, probably. Some lesson about living in the present I’m supposed to extract and apply to my own increasingly nostalgic existence.

I’ll work on it after I finish being quietly annoyed that today’s snow doesn’t seem as committed as I remember snow being.

Still, as the snow falls — thick, quiet, unhurried — I find myself listening for something older than alerts or forecasts. That deep silence. The one that once turned roads into fields and disasters into legends. The one that made a week feel like a season and an overturned truck full of walnuts into a subdivision’s origin story.

The one that reminds me that sometimes the world doesn’t stop to frighten us.

Sometimes it stops to give us a story we’ll still be telling forty years later, even if we’re no longer entirely sure which parts actually happened and which parts we’ve been adding to over time, like snow accumulating on a story until it’s bigger than the event that started it.

The snow is still falling. I’m still watching. And somewhere out there, squirrels are probably burying things they’ll forget about until spring, creating forests they’ll never live to see.

Which is either profound or just what squirrels do.

I’m not sure it matters which.