Blizzards and the Natural Wrath

I'm sitting on the couch in my apartment under a comforter and several blankets as the snow falls sideways outside.

It's a blizzard, and it reminds me of home. They say the wind is gusting to 40 mph, and we'll get several inches of snow (I'm thinking, only several?). But for the fact that I put off my laundry until today, I'm pretty happy about the weather. I like slogging through the snow drifts - Nic canceled class today because "This weather is ---damn ridiculous. There's snow drifts outside for Pete's sake" - and feeling my cheeks sting as my torso is sweating. I like being inside, in heat, with some herbal tea (saw the doctor today and she said my tonsils were "huge", so I'm trying to stave off illness), my computer with internet, and many hours of work to do, while outside there is chaos; beyond my cheap windows (the down side of paying for the head instead of K&G - they have no reason to invest in some decent windows) in the titanium gray, nature is happening.

I am amazed at how much the trees are bending, how they are both supple and hard. There's a bird's nest jostling in a treetop, yet it does not fall, or fall apart.

This is why I want to live in cities for the rest of my life. Only there is the contrast between man and nature so pure and crystalline. The trees all manage to stand, with nests nestled among the tippity-top branches. The animals find places to go and stay alive. But I can barely walk a mile to school. And cars slip off the road traveling at only 5 mph. And this is Chicago, the Winter City, the city where snowplowing is a partisan affair.

Speaking of snowplows. In four years at the U of C, I have never seen any snowplows on the streets, except for a few U of C ones. Richard M. Daley, Mayor controls the plows. Richard M. Daley, Mayor hates the South Side. No one plows the South Side. Interesting.

Anyway, this is Chicago and people should be used to snow and yet still a day of hard snow just shuts everyone down. Nature, a mother and devil, comes in and seizes the streets and the sidewalks and forces you to look at her, to recognize her grip on everything, her grip which is slowly, slowly tightening around us as we keep poking her in the ribs.

But I am here, in my apartment, where the only gusts come from the heating vents and the only snow is the the pile of slowly-melting flakes on my pants. And still, Nature wins in the end:

I have to go outside now to creep down the rickety wooden back stairs, covered in snow and ice and most certainly the gravest threat to my life that I will face today, and put my laundry into the dryer.