buffalo snow

once in every life, everyone should experience a buffalo winter... i don't mean a dry winter either... i mean a winter that brings six or seven feet of buffalo snow in a week and more than two feet in a single day... buffalo snow is blinding snow and yeah, it happens in other places too (like the drive down from maine a few years ago when, until we got to southern connecticut, it was a blind white out from when we left around midnight until dawn, but that is not what i am remembering in this particular entry)... just before the millennium changed, i believe 1999, buffalo snow fell to the tune of sixty-five inches in fifteen days (and i think it was even more) and it stayed on the ground with drifts of fifteen feet for a few months... that's buffalo snow...

i lived there and this weekend's storms remind me... it was one of the most challenging times of this life and lately i am feeling a similar sense of trepidation (and pending doom) that i felt before i was forced to move to buffalo (when toronto didn't want me anymore, but that is another very long story for another time, blog, and life, even)... and the numbness and isolation i felt inside was so appropriately mimicked by the numbing blinding snow storms that year... stand in the midst of a blinding blizzard and you know a frigid isolation that may only be surpassed by standing alone on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean... but hey, that's just a memory, today is real... and i hope to find a way to turn the landslide i've been sensing around... words, words remind me, words distract me, words embrace me... no one said it would be easy....

when there is enough snow piled up and still falling to cancel an nfl football game (which used to be played in any weather), that's buffalo snow...

feel free to define it for yourself :)