Waiting for a Train Wreck

Before Modern Communications put the world at our fingertips 24/7 farmers predicted the weather by watching the sky, the birds, and their livestock and by listening to the aches and pains in their joints and sinuses.  Knowing that a blizzard is on the way is equivalent to being on a train headed for a wreck you are powerless to avoid.  Tonight the thermometer is headed for the basement with a clear, calm sky leading us to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures.  Tomorrow the temperature will rise and so will the winds as a winter storm that began life in Texas roars across the Great Lakes collecting moisture and dumping drifting snow over Southern Ontario—the meteorological equivalent of a train wreck.  Our fore-fathers would have made sure the wood-box was full; the cattle well-fed and watered; their oil lamps trimmed and full; and settled in for the inevitable.  If the drifts were too high to be shoveled they tunneled to the barn to care for their animals or the buildings were inter-connected.  In the days before million-dollar snow ploughs it could be weeks before the outside world became reachable.  Heading into the Christmas Season at the Post Office I have a similar feeling; however modern cities don’t normally shut down because of weather and when Christmas volumes coincide with heavy snow hardship ensues.