Blizzard in April

By Jane Farrell

Midwestern winters can be not only tough, but just plain weird. Actually, so can the spring. A few weeks ago, we suffered through a spring blizzard, more than halfway into April. Not even a storm – a blizzard, with 13 inches of snow and winds of 35 mph blowing the flakes vertically.

I didn’t quite believe the weather guys, mostly because at least one of them made a dire prediction last December that turned out to be completely wrong. Not a flake in the sky. But this time around, they all seemed very serious and even interrupted regular shows to give updates from, as they say, the Weather Center.

That led me to turn to one of my favorite websites, Accuweather, which gives a minute-by-minute forecast for your town. Watches (serious) and warnings (really serious) are in orange, while out of the ordinary forecasts are an appealing shade of blue (snow for the next 120 minutes!) At one point, the National Weather Service advised that travel would be “very hard to impossible.”

The next day we watched helplessly as snow piled up in our driveway. We tried to shovel, but no sooner were we done than our work was covered over. Even our biggest shovels wouldn’t work. To top it off, transplanted urbanites that we are, we had no snow blower. Our neighbors do, but snow blowing is a lot harder than it looks, and we hesitated to ask for help. We normally depend on a snow guy to dig us out with a truck, but our contract with him had expired two weeks before because, you know, winter was over. It’s spring!

Desperate, I called the lawn person, who happens to have a snow truck of his own, and he dug us out after the snow stopped falling. He didn’t even charge us. (But I sent him a check anyway.) He now has a contract to do our snow next year, and we’re making sure it extends into spring. Maybe into May, just to be on the safe side.