As a kid growing up in Cleveland, i often awoke on winter mornings to an eerie silence, deeper than the usual pre-dawn quiet of our tucked-away suburban street. that silence meant it was snowing.
There was something comforting and inevitable in that silence, in being swaddled in flannel and wool, knowing there was no need to hurry out into the cold because the snowdrifts in the driveway needed to be cleared and traffic would be a mess.
Such peace seldom envelops Little Rock on winter mornings. Instead of soft, fat snowflakes, I sometimes wake up to the jarring tink-tink-tink of frozen pellets slamming against the windows. These are not opportunities for luxuriating in bed. Ice storms make me leap up, jangled and anxious, to gulp strong coffee and bolt out the door, trying to get wherever Iâm supposed to be before the roads become impassable.
One year, it didnât happen that way. On Dec. 25, 2000, I met the first ice storm I ever loved.
We all knew it was coming. And we werenât happy about it, especially since Arkansas had been walloped with an aggressive blast of freezing rain on Dec. 13 that knocked out power to some 245,000 utility customers. My husband and I were among them, unable to take advantage of our employersâ offer to put us up in a downtown hotel near our office because we wouldnât abandon our three dogs. We showered at home (gas water heater), walked to work (where we fretted and shared stories of roughing it), walked back home, drank a lot of bourbon, made something for dinner (gas cooktop), piled on a thick layer of Labrador retrievers and went to bed in the pitch dark of 7:30 p.m. It was 43 degrees in the house. Three days of that was enough.
Dec. 25 was different. We got up, made cappuccino, opened presents. Our dinner guests, noting the certainty of ice in the forecast, called to cancel. A holiday all to ourselves! As freezing rain began to fall, we bundled up, pulled on our Yaktrax (the best way to stay vertical when walking on ice), and romped in the yard with the dogs, who skittered around with cold-weather exuberance.
When the power went out in the afternoon, we switched our dinner plan from roast beef (the electric oven now being useless) to beef stew (again, gas cooktop) and made a wonderful mess by mixing and rolling out homemade noodles, cutting them into strips and hanging them over every available surface to dry.
Candles were lit, a stout zinfandel was opened. I still remember the scent and robustness of that stew, the texture of those uneven noodles, the fun we had eating Christmas dinner by candlelight.
Another early bedtime, without the dread of what might come next. And when we awoke, the power was on. Ice coated the streets, but it couldnât chill the joy of our holiday on ice.