POST BLIZZARD TAKE

So, I had the same sensation when I went out this morning after more than two feet of snow that I always have after an intense snowstorm: awe and joy. You might say easy for me since neighbors charitably snow blew the sidewalk in front of the old house my apartment is in, and others shoveled the walk to the sidewalk before I could (though I shoveled the porch and steps late last night and some more this AM).

But in previous years, before my kids and loved ones kept warning me not to shovel (well actually they were doing it then too but I ignored them) I loved shoveling snow the morning after a snow storm. I would do it in short spurts with lots of resting on the shovel handle digging that unique muffling of the world's sounds (aided by few or even no cars driving by) that you only get after a snowstorm. The brightness of the almost cloudless sky, the blue of it seemingly the only color other than the pure white of unsullied snow blown into sensuous curves covering everything, in some spots as high as four foot drifts, and the dark of tree trunks and limbs where the snow was blown off.

I wish I could take a photo on my phone and transfer it to this post, but I'm a little techno-dyslexic, and the limitations of any photograph would stop me anyway. There's no way to capture being surrounded by a few feet of new fallen snow under a bright blue sky with the few sounds coming across as distant or so muffled they seem distant.

In my almost twenty years in L.A. I missed this, so I'm grateful for it, at least today, before it begins to melt and the slush in the street gets sprayed onto the snowbanks turning them into something less pleasant. But for now, I can even shrug off the rightwing troll who continues to plague my blog even though I now can block his comments and have for years.

It hasn't stopped his rightwing parroting, including his latest asking how I like my two feet of global warming. The guy actually thinks because we had a blizzard after the most snow-free winter ever, that somehow that negates the reality that 2015 was the warmest year on record and 2014 the warmest before that. It would be pathetic if it wasn't emblematic of the brain washing the right has accomplished in recent decades.

[PS: I don't in any way mean to diminish the real hardships caused by this blizzard, especially by the worst flooding since Sandy down the Jersey shore.]