"I know no company will come."

A giddiness takes over the place. Even Max The Ever-Curious Kitten senses it. Something's up, or, more properly, almost up. Everything appears perfectly normal as of this moment, perfectly normal and also odd. I know, though the sky hasn't started showing any sign yet, that a snowstorm's been moving in our direction for the last couple of days. It's slated to hit this evening, so this day already carries a last day aura, as if it offers a final chance or two. By this time tomorrow, travel will have become difficult to perhaps impossible. A gallon of milk might just as well sit on Alpha Centauri as on the shelf of the village inconvenience mart; both will become equally inaccessible by then. My mind races trying to remember what I need to do before, because there will be no doing after this storm hits.

Of course there will still be doing then, but this Impending upends my sense of continuity. I Google "Impending" and receive "Doom" in return. This storm will in no way doom us. We're warm and cozy with utilities safely buried beneath the frozen ground. The Muse can work from home if she needs to. The winds accompanying this cold front won't be blowing the roof off this place or any other. The Schooner's windshield washer fluid tank's filled to the top and I even have an extra half gallon on reserve. The larder's stocked for Thanksgiving and we're grateful to have no travel plans or invitations to gather anywhere else. We seem self-sufficient enough to weather this quickly passing storm. Another one "threatens" Friday.

I use terms like 'threatens' and 'doom' as if I were actually threatened or doomed. I feel a change looming and automatically anticipate some worst case when we'll most likely experience nothing more than a mildly extreme case of The Normals for here. It's November going on December now. Snow happens then. Has my existence become so boringly predictable that I need to conflate small change with potential catastrophe? I have tremendous predictive power informing me. The ten o'clock newscast offers four slightly differing possibilities, none certain, but any one of them likely, and none of them even distantly terrifying. Still, this Impending sense invades me and even the kitten seems to feel it.

I will be up extra early tomorrow, up and suiting up for brief confrontations with nature. I'll shove snow in successive stages, feeling every bit as if I am defending civilization as I plow. The piles beside the driveway, almost completely melted before this one will start, will grow back into their usual uneven mounds again, there then gone again until May. The neighbors will dust off their snowblowers which will scream doom to kingdom come while I quietly curse the snowplow berm deposited at the end of our drive. I will derive great satisfaction from standing up to this paper dragon while I judge the quality of the prediction. Perdition will not have arrived, even if double the forecast snowfall accumulates. I've done three feet before. I'll just push and scrape and produce a pathway that any unexpected company might use to come and visit me and The Muse, though I know no company will come.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz