I am sitting on the edge of a blizzard. The anticipation is killing me. The dark of the night has overtaken the countryside, but the first flakes have yet to fall. Visibility has already dropped to zero in several areas south and west of here, but for the moment, mother nature remains eerily silent. Waiting for the other shoe to drop is easily worse than actually watching the snow fall. Blizzards are a strange brand of storm, a sort of frozen hurricane with a wicked breeze and slippery precipitation. But they are rare, and I’ve only experienced a few of these natural wonders of winter weather. By itself, snow does not a blizzard make. A lot of snow is just a nuisance, makes driving really tough, and snowballs are an option, but just snow does not a blizzard make. A real blizzard whips up when the wind starts to blow–15 to 20 miles an hour and above. When the snow starts to move horizontally, you might think of taking cover, somewhere warm where the wind cannot reach you. The wind in winter is not your friend. In a full-blown blizzard, the wind drifts the snow, reduces visibility, hides the roads, covers the sidewalks, and nips at your nose and ears. My most bitter winter memories have to do with fighting the wind as I walked to school, tried to run, made my way home. And yet, if you don’t have to go out, if you get a school day, a day off, a day when you have no responsibilities outside of your home, then you can sit by a fire and watch it snow, let the wind blown, the temperature drop, and the snow fall. From the security of your own well-heated home, a blizzard is a thing of beauty to experience as it whips and whirls the snow outside your windows. The ballet between wind, snow, and cold is a masterwork of chaos, anarchy, and power. We puny humans think we can control things, we think that we are so powerful, we think that we are the center of the universe, but a blizzard will make you think otherwise. Witnessing the power of a winter storm is a grim reminder of how fragile we really are, that we can only survive under “Goldylocks” conditions where the temperatures are just right, where the wind doesn’t blow too much, where barometric pressures won’t kill us. The atmospheric conditions generated by a blizzard are extreme and dangerous. The marvelous deadly beauty of a blizzard is a hint that we are small, fragile players on the face of this strange planet. We over-estimate our own importance, our ability to control our environment, our reliance on heating and electricity to keep us from freezing to death. There is this delicate balance between the tragic dangerous symmetry of dancing ice and snow and our humble delicate bodies that crave a warm protected nest that will shield us from the freezing daggers of a blizzard. To experience such a storm borders on the sublime–the violence, the danger, the unpredicatability, but to witness such a thing is also to respect it and keep one’s distance. Nevertheless, there will be those people, tonight and tomorrow, who will need rescuing from the snow when their vehicles go into the ditch, spinning and sliding off the road as they challenge the laws of physics. No matter how much you spend on four-wheel drive and stitched leather seats, your luxury SUV is no match for a healthy blizzard. Something to think about.