Just when I was thinking (thanks to an armed insurrection, a rather spoiled inauguration, and a second impeachment of The Former) that 2021 wasn’t stacking up to be the big relief from 2020 that we’d all hoped for, a glimmer of hope….snow was in the forecast. I don’t just like snow, I love snow. The beautiful flakes drifting down, the light reflecting into even the darkest rooms, the beautiful hushed quiet. I love it all.

Snow was forecast, but what we got was crazy. It started on Friday, February 12 in the afternoon – a little sleet, a little grapple, a little snow with tiny, little, frozen flakes. By that evening, it had begun raining, but with the temperature about 28 degrees we started to notice ice building up on the trees, on the cars, and on the sidewalk. Eventually, about 9:00 we lost our power, our phone and our internet. We weren’t sure exactly what to expect as in addition to our power, internet and phones being out, the cell reception was terrible.

About 10pm in the pitch darkness, the dogs began barking, and they barked, and they barked, for hours they barked. The trees had lost the battle with the ice and all around our house we could hear limbs breaking and crashing to the ground. We could see the flashes of transformers blowing. At about midnight, I heard a crack and loud scraping noise. I looked out the back window to see that almost the entirety of our 50′ Japanese Hornbeam had torn under the weight of the ice and was lying on either side of our house in the yard – one side missed the house by feet, the other side had scraped down the house without any damage. We were very lucky.

The night of the 12th brought another storm and even more freezing rain to our little hamlet. We still had no electricity and found that we only had enough cell service to go online to look for news updates at about 2:30 in the morning. Trees continued to fall and branches got lower and lower, breaking under the additional inch of ice built up on them. Just 10 miles away the storm brought 10″ – 12″ of snow, but we had mostly freezing rain.

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