Asakiyume mita

My attempt to influence the wind's snow sculpting didn't work super well, but I do have a few photos to share.

Here are a couple of before shots. One was of a mound of snow from shoveling...



You can see behind it a piece of wood and a lawn sign. Those were my other ventures. The piece of wood didn't do much of anything, but the lawn sign worked a little. Here's a close-up before shot of the lawn sign:



And here's an after shot, taken this morning, of the same sign.



If you click through and enlarge, you can see a little ridge on the right side of the sign, and two hollows on the left side ... although I think that bigger hollow is maybe just one of my footprints, all smoothed and shaped, and not caused by the sign at all...

Here's an after shot of the mound. The high-contrast sun-and-shadow situation makes it a little hard to see how it's been smoothed over, but...



And lastly, even though I didn't take a before shot of this, here's another case where you can see a lot better how a sign interfered with how the wind shaped the snow:

At 6:30, this windstorm knocked out the power, and I freaked out, picturing us without power for days in the well-below-freezing temperatures. The pipes would surely freeze and burst and then cost extravagant amounts to fix, and anyway we wouldn't be able to fix them right away because everyone else's pipes would have burst too, and so the helper-fixer people would be in short supply.

I went to the supermarket to get milk and maybe another candle. In the parking lot, I met Wakanomori, who'd just gotten off the bus; he said the town to the west had power. I knew from the gossip in the supermarket that the town to the east didn't.

"We'll just have to sleep in one huge bundle in the living room under coats and blankets to keep warm," I said as we drove home. Without street lights or house lights, it was deeply dark everywhere.

As we were about to turn in at our driveway, our headlights illuminated a huge and unearthly creature, the color of smoke and about as corporeal, standing where we usually park. It was a deer--standing in the middle of the driveway. It stared at us a moment, then ceded us the parking space and walked away down the slope into our neighbor's backyard accompanied by a friend who'd been standing by our apple tree.

"National Grid estimates the power will be back by 11 pm," the healing angel reported, once we were inside.

"Please let it be so," I prayed.

And a minute later, the lights came on.

I think it was a blessing from the deer.

There's a strong wind out there, pulling out the teeth of the night by the sound of things, and tugging at roof shingles and pushing at walls. I wonder what daylight will look like.