With my uncanny sense of timing, I am coming down with some ague on my day off. So I am at home treating myself with sleep, hot tea, and whiskey, and thinking about forgoing the first two.
I also have a pot of chili simmering on the stove against Kathleen's return home from work at Trinity Church in Towson.
It is just as well to be home, because the Death From the Sky arrived within the last hour.*
I see on Twitter that some of you who endured the brutality of this storm in the middle section of the country are snow-wimp-shaming us Mid-Atlantic sorts, with some justification, but I should explain some things to you.
In four years at Michigan State and six at Syracuse, I understood that people can learn how to drive in snow, even very heavy snow. But people here have only sporadic experience and have not acquired the technic.** So they either drive at five miles an hour with the flashers on or speed along as if possession of an SUV exempted them from Newton's laws of motion. It's scary to be on the road among them.
You should also keep in mind that Baltimore and Washington rest astride the typical dividing line between snow and rain, so that the lovely powdery snow just now glistening on the trees and the ground will soon turn to sleet and freezing rain, coating with roadways with a sheath of ice. And, if memory serves, even in Michigan and Upstate they are not fond of trying to drive on ice.
Kathleen should be coming home soon, I hope safely, to taste the chili and tell me what can be done to repair it. And now, I think, it's time for some medicine.
But before I leave you, one last reminder: Anyone you hear referring to snow as "white stuff," either jocularly or ironically, is deserving of obloquy.
*Yes, last hour, not past hour, and don't try to pretend that you didn't understand what I meant.
**The method. From the Greek tekhne, "art," "craft." In philosophy the term is used to describe practical or applied knowledge.