CHAOS IN WHITE: Sandy Blizzard 2012 in North Central West Virginia

The storm was supposed to begin on Monday, October 29, and the weather forecasters predicted three or more feet of heavy wet snow. Of course, I was hoping they were wrong, very, very wrong. By 8:30 a.m., just as they had said,  wet snow was mixing with the rain.

I spent the day doing laundry and cooking things like pumpkin pies (without the crust), applesauce, and homemade granola.  These are all things that would keep for a while without refrigeration.

By 3:00 p.m. it began to snow heavily, and the ground had cooled enough that the snow was accumulating.

I was concerned that our Japanese Bloodgood Maple was still in leaf.  It is very special because  I bought it in 1979 for my dad as a Father's Day gift at a garden center in Louisville, KY, where we were living. It was little more than a twig at that time.

A wispy, ethereal quality was present as a giant, snowy paintbrush left
everything colored in a  delicate white.

As darkness approached, the snow came down unbelievably fast.  My husband, daughter and I went outside with flashlights so that we could shake some of the snow off the maple and other shrubs.

The earlier picture of our birch had changed to this as it bent
closer to the earth.

By 8:30 our power was gone, and we were not to have it restored until November 11, thirteen days later.

There is a special uneasiness, an eerie feeling when the weather is bizarre, and this night had that quality. We rested on couches downstairs in case a tree came crashing through our roof.  No one really slept, and my husband and I dutifully fed our wood stove throughout the night.  Without electricity, it was our only source of heat.

The snow kept falling and so did the trees and branches with loud cracks. Twice during the night we saw red-yellow pulsing lights that seemed to echo across the sky, ending with a stabbing, bright light as transformers for the power line blew.

The next day when daylight came, we saw trees bent downward under the weight of the heavy, wet snow. This is the same birch tree of the day and night before.

The trees created bazaar shapes as they arched under the weight of the nearly two feet of snow we had received.

Everywhere we looked, it was a scene that seemed as if it had been created on the movie set of a science fiction film.  Our beautiful trees with downward bent tops swayed like a strange, hoary creature trying to make it's way into the field. Eventually, almost all of these would sustain some damage.

During the previous night, one vehicle had made its way along the road before the trees began to break. Now the road was impassable with downed trees and large broken branches.

It continued to snow heavily the entire day, and by the morning of the third day, we had received at least three feet.

By Thursday, the road was plowed, and it had warmed enough to create a great deal of thawing. Life began again, stores opened in town as their electricity was restored, but for some, the winter hung heavily upon us as we waited and hoped for our electricity to be restored.