Snow in Seattle

I grew up in Duluth, where snow is not news. It arrives in November, settles in like a relative, and leaves sometime around Easter if you're lucky. Nobody cancels anything for it. My mother drove to work through winters that would shut this city down for a month, and the only time I remember school closing, it was for cold, not snow, and we went sledding anyway.

So when the first flakes came down last Sunday and my phone started buzzing with warnings, I was smug about it. I called my mother to be smug together. She asked how many inches, and when I told her, there was a pause long enough to fit the whole of Lake Superior in it.

I am less smug now. Not because of the snow, which is a few inches with ambitions, but because of what Seattle does with it. This city doesn't fight snow. It stops.

The studio sent a note on Friday afternoon telling us not to come in, and by Friday night my street had gone quiet in a way I've never heard it. No buses grinding up the hill. No one leaning on a horn. Just people walking down the middle of the road, because there was nowhere else to walk and nothing coming. On Saturday morning a man went past my building on cross-country skis, very slowly, with enormous dignity. An hour later two kids came down the same hill on the lid of a plastic storage box, and their father came after them on a baking sheet and was louder than both of them put together.

In Duluth we'd have had the walk shoveled by seven and gone to work. Here, nobody owns a shovel. My neighbor downstairs cleared the front steps with a dustpan and a spatula, and when I came down in my good boots with my real shovel, which my mother made me bring when I moved and which I have been mocked for ever since, she looked at it the way you'd look at a fire truck. I did the steps, the walk and half the block. I have never been so popular in my life.

The grocery store on the corner ran out of bread and milk by Saturday noon, which I expected, and out of frozen peas, which I still can't explain.

Here's the thing I didn't expect. I like it. I like a city that looks at four inches of snow and decides, all together, that nothing today is as important as being outside in it. People said hello to me who have walked past me for five years. Someone built a snowman in the park with a traffic cone for a hat. I took the long way to the store for no reason at all, which in Duluth in February would get you a look from everyone you passed.

They say there's more coming tomorrow. The studio has already said to stay home. I've got soup on and a mystery I've been saving, and my shovel is by the door, where everyone on this block now knows to find it.

Where you live, does the snow stop things, or do you shovel and go?