...or, if you prefer, self-sufficient.
There is no other time when the whole world
seems composed of one thing and one thing only.
- Joseph Wood Krutch
I wasn't even supposed to be here. Not today. Not yet. I'm standing by the window. My sixteenth floor hotel window. Staring at the swirling snow flying aimlessly by my Philadelphia window. The deep passageways between the tall buildings create turbulent, violent winds carrying the tiny flakes in loops and circles. Back and forth. Up and down.
Sometimes, for extended periods, the snow flies straight up the building wall, making my window look like a film played back in reverse. I'm almost tempted to look down and see if the snow is really leaving the ground and returning to the sky above. A Benjamin Button snow storm in an ordinary world.
Slowly the darkness outside settles in. Leaving long, icy-wet, streaky patterns on the window the only evidence of the alabaster chaos that reined for hours. Unless, of course, I lean forward and look down on the empty, desolate white-blanketed street below. And I remember why I'm here.
I spent the last three nights in three different hotel rooms, and it literally took planes, trains and automobiles to get here. The last blizzard shut down the DC airports. Snowmaggeddon, Obama called it, just four days ago. My flight cancelled, I was re-directed to Philly, via St. Louis, missing the Super Bowl. But I didn't mind much.
Sunday night, weary after a day of travel, I stumbled into at an airport hotel and went straight to bed, trying to make friends with the Eastern time zone. The clock said 10:30 PM but my body said 8:30. I needed to sleep quickly because my alarm was set for 05:15 AM. Eastern time. 03:15 body-time. An angry wake-up call, a coworker pickup, and a cautious wintery near-four-hour car-ride to Washington, DC.
A day of meetings and a hotel night later, and the approaching second snow storm was an unnegotiable fact. Nobody was going to make it to the client office Wednesday or Thursday. We would have to meet over phone. Them from their homes and us from hotel rooms. We opted to drive back to Philly before the storm. Save hotel costs and get the locals home.
My coworkers live outside the city and my hotel is downtown. So, upon reaching Wilmington, Delaware, I caught a train. A few hours later the snow began coming down. Here I am now. 24 hours of snowfall and repeated room service. I have not ventured outside the hotel and I don't know when I will. Not yet. Not today. And I wasn't even supposed to be here.
