The winter I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, it snowed fourteen times, beginning in October when there were still leaves on the trees. My husband, one- year-old daughter, and I were living in a house at the top of a steep driveway. We had two cars, but only one was four-wheel-drive. When there was more than a scattering of snow on the ground, only one of us could make it out until the plow guy came.

The plow guy, a crusty, unsmiling fellow in a battered pickup with a plow rigged to the front end, had been recommended to us with some reluctance by a friend – reluctance not because of his demeanor, but because she used him herself when it snowed. Just as people hesitate to share baby-sitter names for fear of reducing their own chances of getting one when they need one, she didn’t want the line waiting for the plow guy to get any longer than it already was. And it was really, really long. Sometimes it would take two or three days for him to get to our house, which left me shut in reading Pat the Bunny to my daughter more times than I care to recall.

“Honey,” I said to my husband after one too many Bunnys, “I’m going to have to sleep with the plow guy.”

“Whatever it takes,” he replied.

And it wasn’t just the snow that year that inconvenienced us. Once, when it was merely raining, strong winds felled a large tree right across our driveway. Having moved to the Vineyard from an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – where most buildings employ a superintendent who fixes almost anything that goes wrong in your apartment – I had no idea what to do in such a situation.

“Where,” I yelled at my husband, “is the super?”

My husband, who at that moment was leaving to meet a taxi at the end of our driveway to go to work, looked at me with great tenderness and said, “Sweetheart, you are the super.”

Things have gone uphill since then. We’ve lived in three other houses, all chosen for the flatness of their driveways. The house we finally bought came with its own plow guy, who clears all the driveways in our neighborhood, usually within a day of any snowfall – a factor that played heavily in our decision to purchase. Besides which, in the ten years since that first winter here, there hasn’t been anywhere near as much snow. That is, until last winter. Last winter, we got the Big One: the Blizzard of ’05.

The day before it hit, the weather gurus were predicting several feet of snow, so we prepared ourselves. We parked our cars facing outward in the garage.
We filled the bathtubs with water and dug out the hurricane lanterns, given the certainty of a power outage. We brought in armloads of firewood.

The morning of the blizzard dawned overcast but precipitation-free; the snow wasn’t supposed to begin until afternoon. However, things inside our house were not good. Both my husband and I awoke with the flu – the really nasty kind that starts deep in your chest and brings aches, chills, fever, and an incessant cough. Our two children – we had a second one during one of those milder winters – were restless and seeking attention that neither of us had the energy to give. So we did what any parent would do in such circumstances: we found them play-dates.

As luck had it, we were able to farm each of them out not just for the day, but for a sleepover. With failing strength, we delivered our progeny to their friends’ houses, then came home and went back to bed.

The snow started at two o’clock in the afternoon, but we hardly noticed it, lying flat on our backs and drifting in and out of feverish sleep. We managed to pad downstairs in the evening and make something for dinner that may have been food. All I remember now is the hot whiskey with honey, lemon, and cloves that we nuked and slurped down, and after that I don’t remember anything.

When we awoke the next morning, the snow was several feet deep, and by the time it stopped around midday, it had drifted high enough to totally cover the glass French doors in our kitchen – seven feet – and we couldn’t see out. It was Sunday, and I began to wonder about the religious affiliation of our new plow guy: was this a day of rest for him?

Perhaps so; he didn’t show up that day. We called our children’s keepers, who were snowed in too, and a second night of sleepovers was arranged. That was at three o’clock in the afternoon, and we were still in our PJs, looking like extras in Night of the Living Dead. We hit the hot whiskeys early and went back to bed.

In the end, we were without our children for several days. When we finally got them back, we were still sick and had to hike out to the end of our road to retrieve them, pulling them home on sleds. Our plow guy had been pressed into service on larger roads, and we weren’t able to move our vehicles until day four.

The irony of this whole situation did not escape us: three whole days and nights sans kids, spent largely in bed while a winter wonderland glowed
outside – married bliss, right? But in this blizzard, only our hot toddies and the vaporizer mist gave us anything like pleasure. I never did wind up sleeping with the first plow guy, and it’s too bad: during the Blizzard of ’05, when sleeping – fitful and phlegmatic – was all I did do, at least I might have enjoyed the memories.