Saturday just proved to me how important it is to be prepared for the unexpected.
By now I’m sure you have either heard about it or experienced it yourself, but some parts of the east coast got snow, in October, a rarity. We are talking decades measuring the last time that this happened, and it fact, previous snows were only dustings. This time, we got actual build-a-snowman kind of snow.
It also happened that we had our church’s annual trunk or treat scheduled. We were prepared to move things indoors, despite the snow and the Nor’easter, until we found out that the parking lot couldn’t be plowed. The maintenance coordinator said that it was too early in the season to expect the plows to be prepared to clear the lot and the roads.
Had this snow occurred in the more seasonable months, it wouldn’t have been much of an issue. We are used to dealing with this kind of weather, just not used to dealing with it in October.
There were sanding trucks and a few plows out, I am happy to report, but many of the roads, including the one in front of our home, hadn’t been touched, making for slippery going. We did lose power for a few hours. Some of our friends in New Jersey lost it for a day and a night.
The stores, this time, still had many of the basic items that tend to leap off of the shelves whenever we get the first storm of the season. I’m guessing that either folks were already stocked up from the recent hurricane, or no one actually believed the weather reports predicting the snow in October.
The next day, things warmed up a bit to start the snow melting. Even here on Monday there is still some of it on the ground. It mingles incongruously against a backdrop of fall leaves.
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