Over the weekend, we got hit with what the TV weather people gleefully (and incessantly) reminded us was the largest snowfall over a twenty-four hour period to fall on Columbus, either in forever or just for a real long time. We ended up with, I don't know, well over a foot.

Remember Travis Bickle? "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street..."? Well, until that day comes, I for one, am perfectly happy for a real snow to fall.
It may not wash away all the scum, but it does cover it up. Along with all the empty cans, litter, dogshit, cigarette butts. Indeed, I've never seen Columbus look so pristine, so - so actually attractive as it does when it's concealed under hundreds of tons of snow.

Sunday was especially delightful- the storm had passed, and bright blue skies shone down over the exquisite, sparkling expanse of Neil Avenue. Down the unshoveled stretches of sidewalk, the pathway is reduced to a series of startlingly deep footholes in the snow. People walk along placing each step carefully into each successive foothole, as though afraid to sully the unbroken snow with unnecessary holes. The difficulty of doing this in deep snow gives our gaits a look of comically exagerrated caution, like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits.

Everybody is cheerful. Strangers help strangers give a shove to wheel-spinning but otherwise motionless cars, and gangs of neighbours-who've probably never before exchanged more than a dozen words- laughingly team up to excavate the cars parked on the side of the road. When one of the neighbour-teams does manage to exhume a car, it hesisitantly trundles off down the road with such caution that it looks like it is driven by one of those drunks who, realizing that he's loaded, tries to look inconspicuous by driving excessively slowly and carefully. Nobody is in a hurry to get anywhere anyway, even if they did have someplace they had to be, the've got a pretty unassailable alibi. Such goodwill and cameradamie among strangers is a wonderful thing, although I suspect it might not long persist if we got a blizzard like this every week.

The saddest thing about blizzards is how ephemeral their beauty is. In a few days the perfect white evenness will increasingly look disfigured and walked upon, the margins of the roadways becoming a grey sloppy soup of slush and filth. Every day a little more of the snow will melt away, unnoticed in its passing, until you realize that there's nothing left but the cold craggy remnants of the heaps once pushed by plows into the corners of parking-lots, grey and gritty and not so much snow anymore as just broken-down ice.

Blizzards are a lot like falling in love.