Winter Storm Warning

Denver and its surrounds were supposed to be smacked upside the head this weekend with a whopper of a winter storm called Xylia. First projected to start Friday night, the slow-moving storm didn't actually get going until Saturday at noon, and nothing "stuck" until Saturday night. We viewed anticlimactic green and brown lawns through our rain-streaked windows until last night, when the temperatures dropped below freezing. Now we have a pretty accumulation of fifteen inches but it's far below the three feet that meteorologists projected. I'd love to have a job where I could be wrong much of the time and still be richly rewarded in salary and side-deals.

Grocery store shelves were empty by Friday and suburbanites suffered post-traumatic stress as the run on groceries recalled the pandemic terror of a year ago, when shoppers around the country rushed stores for canned goods, cleaning products and toilet paper. The pandemic has created a scarcity mentality in us - or at least in me - when I'm in fear of serious repercussions much of the time. When the worst has actually happened, there seems to be no reason for it not to happen again.

I convinced Aden to stay with us this weekend as her roommates were going to be out of town and Boulder was projected to get at least two feet of snow. She rolled her eyes when she came downstairs yesterday and saw the bare roads, but made the best of writing a paper in her room and whipping up chocolate chip cookies after dinner. We played music and games each of the last two nights, recalling the days of March 2020 when we felt alone in our sinking ship and made the best of it. 

After the past twelve months, I may never lose my instinct to circle the wagons when a threat emerges. My senior son, William, warns me that he is not coming home once he sets off for college, and tells me not to expect his presence during future emergencies. I cross my fingers and secretly hope that he ends up in Boulder with his sister, so I can at least get updates on his health and wellbeing from an outside source. Though I really do want the kids to grow up and away, become more independent and less stressed as time distances us from the COVID year, it's difficult to return to my pre-pandemic mindset of trust in the universe. Not every disaster is anticlimactic, and at the moment I'm in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the other meteorological shoe to drop.