Patricia Johenning had planned a memorial service Saturday for her recently deceased mother, Emma. But as she shoveled snow from the driveway of her home in West Running Brook, Columbia, after the second recent storm, she decided spring might be safer.
"I think it's going to be in April," she said of the service to remember her 90-year-old mother, who died Jan. 19.
Johenning, 60, is thinking about joining a neighbor in buying a snowblower. The retired federal employee has lived in Columbia for six years, and she isn't used to lifting heavy, deep snow. "I have a heating pad" for her back, she said.
"You just have to kinda keep working on it," she said as she shoveled before the latest storm ended. "To wait and just do it at the end is too hard." The snow in front of her rancher drifted as high as the ornamental lightpost in her front yard. Johenning had bought groceries at the Dorsey Hall Giant on ...Tuesday, she recalled after some thought. The snow has been disorienting, she realized.
"It's like time. ... It's so weird. It's like, what day is it?" she said.
As the second storm in a week sent all of Maryland into a tailspin, Howard residents were coping as best they could. Virtually every public gathering place was closed in the county Wednesday and many, like county government buildings, the Mall in Columbia and Columbia Association facilities, remained closed Thursday.
But not everyone stayed indoors through the storm.
At one Howard County supermarket, only the bold and the bored appeared to be willing to brave the howling winds and blowing snow.
"I grew up in Montana, and lived in Alaska for 11 years," said Ed Warwick, 45, who had a bunch of bananas in his basket and his son Tyler, 14 at his side. Warwick said he lives close enough to the Owen Brown Giant to walk, but he drove his Jeep Wrangler a few miles and back to pick up Tyler, who had slept at a friend's house.
"I love this," Ed Warwick said. Tyler, a freshman at Oakland Mills High School, has lived virtually all his life in Columbia, but he said he likes the snow, too. The reason was as obvious as the sly smile on his face - no school for a week.
The store was operating with a skeleton staff, so specialty counters weren't open, but there was at least some of almost everything on the often half-empty shelves.
Chimere Brooks, 30, a medical assistant and Howard Community College student, also went to the Giant on Wednesday to shop. She lives just a few hundred yards from the village center, but had a cart full of bread, orange juice and other items. "The only thing they didn't have was eggs," she said.
"I just needed to get out," she said, though she had no complaint about having the day off.
"Being home gives me more time to study," she said.
Conditions were so bad Wednesay that County Executive Ken Ulman said county plow drivers were told to use their own judgment about whether to pull off the road until the snow stopped.
"I have to prepare people for the reality that this is something that will take a few days to dig out of," he said. With snow already piled high along most streets after the first storm, the county will likely have to begin using dump trucks to haul it to public parks - a slow, tedious process. Howard normally only does that to clear the metered parking spaces along Main Street in historic Ellicott City.
The one good thing to come from the storms, Ulman said, was the close cooperation and sharing of workers and equipment between the county, school board, Columbia Association and Howard County General Hospital.
"This has been a really good example of institutional cooperation," he said.
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