I Dreamed It Snowed Like Buffalo

If you have turned on a tv, listened to a radio, read a newspaper or simply logged onto Facebook lately, you probably know that Buffalo NY suffered a record early snow fall this week.  Not just a little light early November snow, but feet and feet of snow, thunder snow even!  Of course, watching the weather channel from the comfort of my home in the fabulous warm Florida Keys, my first thought is "How do people live like that?!"

It's interesting for me watching the news footage of cars and portions of houses nearly covered in snow drifts.  To be honest it is how I always think of Buffalo, New York.  When I was a child I remember hearing about a big snow storm in Buffalo.  I think now that it must have been the blizzard of '77 which left Buffalo frozen under for days.  I just remember hearing about the cars buried in drifts, people trapped inside their homes because of snow drifts over their doors, and I was both fascinated and terrified at the same time.  I would try and imagine snow that deep but at that point I had never seen more than 2 or 3 inches of snow in my life.  The thought of snow deeper than I was tall stretched even my pretty vivid imagination.  That's when the dreams began.

It was a recurring dream theme for a while afterwards.  Usually it began with my brothers and me opening our front door to find a solid wall of snow packed against it.  We would dig a tunnel out into the yard, then start digging upward so we could get above the snow line.  Since we were just children, and in my dreams the snow was a good 12 feet deep, we had to make a ladder of our bodies and would send Mark up to pop through the top since he was the smallest.  Once Mark confirmed that he could get through the top crust, we would make stair steps in the vertical tunnel so we could all climb up and have a look around.  Of course Ken designed the tunnels and figured out how to get rid of the extra snow with a special process he came up with (the engineer even then!)  Yes, I had very vivid dreams as a child.  I can still remember the feel of the cold smooth snow tunnel, the cold air in my face when I stuck my head out the top; and the look of the world, all still and white and undisturbed, dotted with nothing but roofs and treetops poking through.  We would try to crawl out onto the top surface and see how long it took to start sinking.  My dream snow was very hard packed.

I swear I dreamed it so often that it almost feels like a memory instead.  As a teenager I met some girls who had lived in South Dakota for a winter as children.  They told stories of a snow stack in their yard that stayed all winter long, and how they had tunnels dug all through it and played in it all season.  It was funny how their stories brought back "memories" of my dream adventures.  And now, after all these years, hearing that Buffalo is snowed under brings to mind my dreams of snow tunnels.