Snow Day

The snow down below. 1:45 PM. Photo: JH.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014. It snowed yesterday in New York, from about ten in the morning until ten at night. It was predicted and unlike a lot of the dramatic weather predictions we get here, this one turned out to be very accurate.

Our NYSD contributor Blair Sabol who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona (although she’s lived a lot of her life, since childhood in the East – namely Philadelphia and New York) and is not a fan of Northeastern winters. (It was 80 degrees in Scottsdale yesterday.)

I sent her this email early yesterday afternoon with this photo I took of East End Avenue looking north with the message below:

“You must admit you’d rather not .... Be here!” She wrote back: “This is your dream come true. Wait till tomorrow when it is 4 degrees .... Throw some snowballs for me!”

It’s true. I left the house today only to get food for my lunch and dinner, and to take the dogs out. When I first went out about 11 am it was really coming down, and traffic on the avenue was moving slowly (and the two schools – Chapin and Brearley – had school buses waiting for the students to be discharged). It was impossible to find a vacant taxi, so I walked the ten city block lengths over to Third Avenue to get my grub and walked back with it.

Snowdays still remind me of “No School” days which were always a thrill when I was a kid, so it was a dream come true. So I treated it like a No School, No Nothing day – reading the papers, reading my favorite blogs, plus the new New Yorker, the new New York Review of Books, and otherwise getting up from my desk every few minutes to take more pictures of the snow falling. Not very exciting to report, I know. And the photos I got were not nearly as exciting as seeing it. First of all the camera doesn’t pick up those trillions of snowflakes that excite and delight the kid.

2:30 p.m. on the corner of 83rd and East End, School buses waiting for the students to board, the US Mail truck delivering.

A man and his dog (who was very excited about the snow).

Nevertheless the roadways were pristine and creaking white and snowpacked. JH’s mother sent an email reporting that she saw a city bus sliding into a 180 reversal on Madison Avenue in the 70s. It was rough going. I called Michael’s. They were open but they were very quiet -- so there were a lot of No School days around town.

It was also very cold, in the low teens. The dogs can’t take the “salt” they put on the pavement – it burns their paws. So I carried them out of rear of the building right onto the unsalted sidewalk that leads to the Promenade on the riverside. The snow was about six inches deep by two p.m., and very powdery. They loved it, and did what they had to do (but were soon ready to get back inside).

At midnight, as I write this, the snow has stopped. The white of the land under yellow street lights makes everything bright and warm to look at from inside my warm rooms. However, the weatherman predicts frigid temperatures with RealFeel below zero. The avenue is quiet now, the road is plowed, some of the sidewalks have been cleared, and the day is done.