Snow Falling on Ashes

It was a cold, gray morning, chance of flurries. As I braced for the weather that's buffeted the East Coast recently, I thought: What a spiraling blizzard of bad policy we face.

Within an hour, a much larger storm than predicted rolled in. Whiteout conditions, two inches of accumulation an hour. School let out early; I bent into the wind to hunt for provisions, my burrowing instinct sharpened by the looming war. The snowstorm felt like practice for the disruption of not-just-another-Desert-Storm. Competing media images of flakes falling and sky falling were mixed up in my mind. I filled the tank of my sensibly efficient automobile and shopped for peace through comfort food: chicken and milk, broccoli and brownie mix. I spent the rest of the day indoors, watching the world disappear beneath a deep blanket of white. It was the Perfect Storm.

How lucky I am, I thought, to be able to indulge my fear of war with this snug fantasy, a jaded city-dweller's dream of post-industrial frontier life, but not too far from Kmart. I am always poised to camp out for up to three days, and there's a childish relief in that. I still have stores of candles left over from Y2K, plus batteries in all sizes, extra nuts and raisins, and a shortwave radio. I have, however, managed to control that recurring sense of panic in the bottled-water aisle of the grocery store--back on the eve of 2000, I was so terribly suggestible that I stocked up on bottles of water so large that when one burst, the floorboards of an entire room were warped in the ensuing flood.

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