This All Seems Familiar

Well, winter has definitely arrived.  I survived picking up my art last Thursday, but had to spend a bit of time on Friday digging out my car from the snow.  My plan to submit an artwork on Saturday morning to the year's first show in Belmar got derailed when my car wouldn't start- the below zero temperatures the night before were enough to kill my battery for good.  Temperatures were actually relatively warm yesterday, melting much of that snow, and started off today in the upper 40's, but are expected to get down near zero again overnight.  It has been already been much worse than that across the midwest, where in many states they've been closing schools to protect kids from the potentially deadly cold.  They wish they could get up to zero.  On the national news they've been talking about how this could be the coldest weather in this country in 20 years.

So what was I doing 20 years ago?  Living through an incredibly cold midwestern winter.  We'll occasionally get some bad winter storms here along the east coast.  I lost a whole week of post Christmas vacation a few years ago, devoting several hours each day to digging snow and ice, waiting for the town to clear the deep snow from the streets.  But generally we get a break being so close to the ocean- it moderates our temperatures a bit.  In the midwest though, arctic cold air can slide down from Canada and be mostly contained by the long mountain ranges that parallel the two coasts.  That whole winter of '93-'94 was bad.  Spent most of my semester break canceling plans because of multiple snow storms every week.  On my way back to Carbondale in January I passed a tractor trailer that had slid of the highway in Pennsylvania, shortly before running right into a new snow storm, and was lucky to fall in behind a convoy of snow plows on the interstate in Ohio, which helped me make reasonable time until my journey had taken me far south enough to be out of the snow's path.  That happened to be the year of my Fourth of July series,  and quite a few of the prints included references to ice and snow.  Did one print specifically about the cold, and it's days like this that make me glad I don't live there anymore.