Elizabeth restlessly got up and looked out the back door. There was a light dusting of snow on the back stoop. “It’s already started,” she said at 11:30 p.m. At first we weren’t sure what the weather was going to do. Not long after it started snowing, we saw it coming down in sheets of sleet. You could hear it hitting the ground. “Oh, it's not going to amount to much!” Eric said. But I knew he was wrong. Before he went to bed, my husband told me that we were supposed to get the brunt of the storm around seven in the morning. Sure enough in the wee hours before dawn (I kept vigil and fed the stove all night) the snow began to slowly accumulate.
        Around 8:00 a.m. while a blizzard was barreling up from the South, we called my sister June in Maine and rubbed it in. She loves snow (she isn’t nick-named Mrs. Christmas for nothing). Eric and I agreed that she gets jealous every time we get socked, and then at the same time we said, “No, jealousy isn’t the right word (jealously being the fear of displacement), it’s unadulterated envy!” As expected, June had to know all the particulars – just how much we had so far and how much were we supposed to get. Maine usually gets our weather a couple of days later, so she knew it must be headed her way. According to the satellite map, however, it looked as if the heart of the storm would track downeast, Bar Harbor way.
    A little while later, my brother Jay (an amateur meteorologist), called and asked, “So, how do you like the snow?”  I often get a call from Jay whenever we're having any kind of major weather disturbance. I asked him if he stayed up waiting for the storm, and he said, “Oh, I couldn't go to sleep. I have to be up when we’re getting weather like this.” We knew that.
       The kids woke up early, bundled into their snowsuits, boots and gloves, and clomped out into the swirling whiteness. According to their calculations we already had two feet, but I thought it was more like a foot and a half. The official reading in Libertyville, a town nearer to Lake Michigan, was 15.8 inches (some lake effect), so we probably got about 12 or 13, give or take a flake or two. What a wonderful way to start the Christmas season – with a knock ‘em dead, stop ‘em in their tracks, good ol’ Midwestern snowstorm! 

The entrance to our driveway

The towering pines across the road

The huge maples up by our neighbor's house

A snow nest

The remnanats of a sunflower up in the garden

Foxy, one of our cats exploring in the snow

The view out my kitchen window

 The old cement silo on the hill