Turkey Day/Snow Day

Early this morning, I was awakened by the sound of a motor running. It was clearly a large piece of lawn equipment--a tractor or leaf blower or some such device--and not a car or anything else. My immediate reaction was "Why did my neighbor have to decide to mow his lawn at 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day?" I tried to ignore the noise, but I was unsuccessful in falling back to sleep after a half hour of tossing and turning. So I crawled out of bed and hobbled to my window with the intention of catching my neighbor red-handed in his incosiderate yardwork, and perhaps casting a stern and disapproving glance his way.

I began to pull on the drawstring of the shade and as I caught my first glimpse of the scene outside, I thought that I must have gone temporarily blind. It was a strange blindness--a kind of reverse blindness. Rather than my field of vision being totally black, the light that reached my eyes from beyond the window was stark white. The white began as the thinnest of slivers, but then continued to grow, unbroken, as I raised the shade higher and higher. The ground, the trees, even my bundled-up neighbor pushing his snow blower down his driveway were all blindingly white. I could barely distinguish the white siding of the house next door from the ground below or the sky above. A feeling of unease washed over me. The scene was familiar, but something about it was sickeningly wrong.

I hurried down stairs to find out whether the same scene was visible out of all of the windows in my house. I jumped down the last three steps and a moment later reached a ground floor window. With an awkward jerk, I pulled the unfurled shade away from the window, and was confronted by yet another view of a snow-covered winter wonderland.

As I looked out that window, and my brain registered the obvious truth that it had snowed overnight, there was a single instant, the briefest of flashes, during which I was convinced that I had missed the entire month of December. I remembered going to sleep during the wee hours of the fourth Thursday of November, Thanksgiving Day. As I drifted off that night, I did not dream of snow or cold; I dreamed of stuffing and cranberry sauce. In southern New England, snow in November certainly isn't unheard of, but it isn't terribly common either. When one wakes up on what one believes to be Thanksgiving morning, one does not expect to be greeted by the remnants of a spontaneous overnight snowfall. Christmas, on the other hand, fits that bill perfectly. And so in that instant, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Christmas day, and that the entire month of December had passed me by while I slept.

During this infinitesimally small cognitive hiccup, I felt like the anti-Scrooge in a bizzaro version of A Christmas Carol. Whereas Scrooge goes to sleep on Christmas Eve and wakes up on Christmas day having learned his lesson and having been given a chance to make up for his failings, I had gone to sleep on Thanksgiving eve and woken up on Christmas day, robbed of an entire month as punishment for squandering so many weeks of my life through my laziness and indecision. I felt awful.

But then the moment passed. I accepted the whiteness outside as what it actually was: a freak late-November snow storm. Without hesitating, I dashed back up to my room, pulled on some warm work clothes and gloves, and headed out to the garage to grab a snow shovel. Before anyone else in my house was out of bed, I was going to shovel the driveway. It was an embarassingly exhausting chore, but for the first time in months I actually felt useful. I had done work! And physical labor at that!

It was a Thankgiving miracle.