Snow siege

Two weeks of lockdown vibes - and it's not over yet

January 2026

Day One

Saturday January 24

The warnings and news alerts had been frequent and, to my ears, hysterical.

Dave read me a Washington Post report. I repeated the phrase “cement-like mixture”.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How do you get a ‘cement-like mixture’ from snow? It’s just water and air.”

“The sleet,” he said. “We’re getting ‘sleet and frozen rain’ tomorrow and apparently that sinks into the snow and turns it hard.”

“Pfft,” I said, with all the confidence of a sun-damaged South African who has experienced a total of two snowy winters overseas.

Last year and the year before the snow was utterly darling. It fell prettily and coated the landscape like icing sugar on mince pies. Driving through snow-coated scenes was like driving through a Christmas card.

Here’s some of what I wrote, in a state of enchantment, after our first snowfall, two years ago:

“Our outside table looks like it’s had a duvet thrown over it – a good quality one, fluffy, with a bright white ironed cover. The corners have been immaculately rounded and the surface is perfectly smooth. It looks like a hotel bed.

“The railings look like they have white polystyrene pool noodles fastened to them. As if someone childproofed them.

“It reminds me of polystyrene, the slightly rough surface of it, the squeak and the crunch.

“I reminds me of candy floss, the way you can pinch it between your fingers or push it up against the roof of your mouth to compress it, to turn it into something like a fragment of stained glass. Is snow a bit like candy floss when you squeeze it to make snowballs?

“The snow we saw falling, it came down through the air in light, white dots, but moving, like a flock of birds.

“The snowflakes moved like a wing, like tiny feathers detatched from wings but moving still, like the wing of a giant angel.

“I looked through the window and the snow was falling in tiny flakes, with the sun on them, like literal glitter. The air full of silver glitter.”

That snow and I should have got a room. (I’m surprised I didn’t say anything about looking out of the window and seeing snow like tiny pieces of ripped tissue. That moment made a big impression on me too.)

Saturday was cold, as per the forecast. No snow was predicted for Saturday in the daylight hours and none fell.

Dave went to buy some salt for the pavement but it was all sold out.

We found the snow shovel.

Day Two

Sunday January 25

When we woke up the world was covered in thick snow, as predicted. It was as soft and light as snow should be. Standing in our dressing gowns, we admired the thick, untouched whiteness. As we waited for the kettle to boil, we practised new phrases: “Artic blast”, “bitter winds” and “frigid temperatures”.

I shared what my friend had told me at bookclub. In Chicago, the cold was so bad you could stick to your car seat. The feathers in your jacket could freeze as you walked.

If you parked your car on the street, you ran the risk of it getting iced in.

I’d ooh-ed at this. It was true, my friend assured me. The snow plows came down the middle of the street and pushed the snow to the edges. The snow then froze around the cars.

I shared that bit with some animation. Sam and I were imagining cars in ice like Dwight Shrute’s stapler in yellow Jello, or a mosquito in resin. Funny!

I also reported that the radio had advised us to keep the doors under the sinks open to prevent the pipes from freezing. ‘Power outages’ were possible.

We might have raised their eyebrows in interest, but not trepidation.

Sure enough, later in the day, the sleet came along. It was like micro-hail and as it covered the thick blanket of snow it made a hish-hish sound like something frying in a pan.

We’ve never heard or seen such a thing.

Dave dutifully shovelled the path and the pavement. It was heavy work but the novelty factor was high. We watched a snow plow clear a nearby street.

This pleased us. Friends had told me we might get snowed in. The big roads were the top priority for the plows. Sometimes smaller, neighbourhood roads were neglected and residents were unable to get out.

Day Three

Monday January 26

Sam’s school declared a snow day and honestly, how could they not?

I had been advised to stock up on food and we had a fridge full of things I’d cooked in a jolly whirl of efficiency on Saturday.

While chopping and cooking, I may or may not have been humming Bless Your Beautiful Hide, my favourite song from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (in which, as you will recall, 14 young people are snowed in together for an entire winter after a terrifying avalanche).

This was not our first snow rodeo. We all had better coats now, and proper gloves. None of us have snow boots, but if I see any in our sizes in the charity shop, I’ll get them.

In our first snow, at the start of 2024, I went out in fingerless gloves and a coat without padding.

“It is so very cold, the snow. Of course it is, but I don’t know snow, and it surprised me. When you put your bare hand in it, or sweep it off a railing, it’s lovely to touch – yes, powdery, soft and luscious, heavier than bubble bath foam or the foam on the waves at Fish Hoek beach – but when the snow melts – and that is instant, and the cold is intense – it’s a bit like burning your hand under the bath tap.

“After the first few cold burns, snow becomes like a stinging plant. Now you know: don’t touch it without gloves.

“The air has a burn to it too. Of course it does. But again, it surprised me. Twice during the snow we walked on the National Mall. It was so cold my face became slightly numb. I mispronounced some words.

“When we were walking around the Monument itself, up there on the circular path, I was wearing cut-off gloves. The gloves stretched over my wrists and tucked under my sleeves but they were inadequate up there on the exposed hill. My hands became itchy with cold, and even though I rubbed them and pushed them deep into my pockets I worried I was giving myself frostbite. My fingers, when I held them close to my face were pink and dry and very wrinkled. A little stiff, like the fingers of a much older person.

“Another time on the Mall I was wearing the same fingerless gloves. I’d been taking photos of the Korean monument, the men in their rain jackets in the jungle, alert and terrified, with incongruous patches of snow on their heads, rain gear and rifles. When I caught up with my Dave and Sam I felt peculiar with cold – as if I might be hungry, or faint. My vision seemed wobbly. A part of me told myself to sit down and eat something. I had a flask of tea in my backpack and I wanted to sit down and have some tea but of course everywhere was covered in snow and it was actually snowing. I had a sandwich in my backpack too and I told myself I would insist on getting an Uber home immediately, and I would eat in the back of the car.”

Wearing our good coats and good gloves, we went for a walk. It was sunset and we saw a mother pulling a child on a sled.

We saw dogs dressed up in puffer jackets.

We saw cars covered in plastic and other cars with their windscreen wipers sticking out like antenna – to prevent from them from getting iced onto the windscreen.

Our car has a cover but we hadn’t put it on.

Dave tried to dig out the wipers.

We skipped shovelling that day.

Day Four

Tuesday January 27

This was a quiet day. Sam had another snow day. We pottered around doing house-y things.

Outside, the snow was like that weird, sticky icy stuff that drops off when you defrost the freezer.

The ground was like a defrosting freezer as well. Slippy. Bumpy. Stained in places.

Day Five

Wednesday January 28

You start feeling claustrophobic. Things don’t reach cabin fever level, but your skin is dry from the indoor heating. You run the risk of getting eczema again. There are lip balms all over the house – on the couch, by the bed, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. At least there should be. Where are they?

It gets dark so early you eat dinner at 6pm. The evening stretches out ahead of you. Who knows how you’ll fill the time – with screens, probably – and you’ll go to bed too late anyway. You won’t set an alarm for the morning.

You haven’t exercised for two weeks. Not even Pilates, because classes are cancelled.

You can’t drive out of town to go skiing because the car is stuck. The time for sledding has passed. Sam is too sick for snowball fights.

The streets are eerily quiet, and white-bright. Everyone’s working from home. Taxis and delivery services are thin on the ground.

Watching TV and watching the time slip past feels like COVID lockdown.

Sam and Dave are forced to walk around the block to put the rubbish bags in the alley because our alley gates are frozen shut.

Day Six

Thursday January 29

Dave’s work trip was postponed but planes are flying again. Before his Uber arrived, he and Sam took the shovel out.

They didn’t dig out the car. It wasn’t possible with the snow shovel.

“Maybe you could borrow a metal spade from the neighbours?” Dave said.

I didn’t reply.

Later, I went outside to assess the challenge.

Has your car ever been snowed in? Not on the side of the highway in a blizzard, or under an avalanche – just sitting outside your house, on the road?

It’s a strange and ridiculous predicament.

We’ve been watching a bit of Top Gear lately. Sam likes it. Our car is called CrossTrek. So instead of starting with shovelling, I thought I’d start by trying to drive my way out.

I got into the car, switching between Reverse and First, revving the engine and creating a fair bit of smoke and crunching noise. I swung the steering wheel left and right, I checked the mirrors repeatedly, preparing for a lurch into the road. What I failed to do was move, either backwards or forwards.

Sam and I retired for the night with the car still sitting out there, ice-that-looked-like-snow piled up around the wheels.

Tomorrow we’ll go next door and ask our neighbours for a spade. It’s going to be like digging a hole in our garden to bury a body – but in reverse, and in snow glare-y daylight.

Online, everyone is obsessed with the snow plows and where they are, and which routes they’ve cleared, and when they’ll be returning to the roads that have frozen over again.

Day Seven

Friday January 30

We haven’t done the car.

We had to walk to the supermarket with empty backpacks. We bought too much and even with gloves on, both Sam and I got painfully cold hands carrying plastic bags. We had to stop often and rub our fingers.

Back home, I drank half a bottle of wine and ate a whole pizza. I also ate a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream.

I did not have a good nights sleep.

Day Eight

Saturday January 31

It’s not good.

I’m embarrassed to leave the house. It’s the indisputable duty of every resident to keep clear the section of pavement (‘sidewalk’) directly in front of their home.

In terms of these unspoken community rules, snow needs to be regularly and thoroughly cleared, in as wide a path as possible. The sidewalk must be sprinkled with salt afterwards. Ideally, shovelling should happen twice a day.

We haven’t done it for a week.

Snow melts in the day and re-freezes at night. When it’s this cold, the snow and ice just sticks around. In Canada and the mid-West, there are city trucks that suck up the snow and take it away on trucks. But Washington DC doesn’t usually have a snow problem in winter. Some winters it doesn’t snow at all.

People in my neighbourhood are as good about the snow as they are about decorating their yards for Christmas, and filling their flower beds with bulbs in the spring.

From the lounge, I can see people out there shovelling – all the time! Everyone has these brightly coloured, deeply bowled plastic spades. There’s a metal strip across the front.

Snow shovels make an unmistakable scraping sound: metal strip on rough cement. Young dads come out with young children. Students take turns. Women come out with dogs.

In our neighbourhood, in the 1950s, boy scouts and army cadets used to ‘shovel the walks’ for the neighbourhood as a matter of pride.

Shovelling ‘cement-like’ snow requires discipline. (Also upper arm strength – and I imagine it’s easier if you don’t have hot flashes every few minutes and have to pull off your coat, hat, gloves, scarf and jersey and throw them in the snow before your temperature drops back, suddenly, to ‘appropriately freezing’ and all your layers must be replaced.)

Dave is away on his work trip. Sam is sick (truly). I’m getting sick (truly). But also, when I’m inside and my joints ache and my nose is running and I think about shovelling, I hear myself saying the words “I’m not from here! I had no idea!”

Granted, this is not an attitude that would win me any prizes in the TV show Survivor, or endear me to any community in general.

My shame is represented by a skinny path through our ice that might have been shovelled by someone else. It might have been done pointedly. (And, obviously, for safety – thank you, kind stranger, and please forgive me, I’m-not-from-here.)

Day Nine

Sunday February 1

Sam’s cold is worse. Every day we both hope he’ll get better overnight, but instead, every day he has a new symptom.

Today he’s coughing, sometimes uncontrollably.

I find ‘mucus relief’ tablets (‘maximum strength’) in the bathroom and we both start taking them. If he suddenly gets properly ill, with bronchitis or pneumonia, I need to be able to look after him.

We need to dig out the car.

I use the claw side of our hammer to hack away at the ice around the tyres.

I got the idea from a petite blonde lady down the road who had a hammer in hand. I’d been on my way to knock on a neighbour’s door for a shovel.

“Is that working?” I asked.

“It’s not the best,” she said. “But it’s working for me.”

It worked for me too. Much lighter than a shovel, and it cut deep. Sam had the snow shovel. He was on clearing duty. It was freezing cold, my hands inside leather gloves, were going numb with cold. So we didn’t clear a full frame around the car. We just chipped out two pathways for the tyres to get out of the white and onto the street.

As soon as I thought I could – and in manner of the gentlemen from Top Gear – I used the vehicle’s own power to shudder my way out.

Day Ten

Monday February 2

Sam’s first day back to school after ten days off.

We had to walk carefully between the door and the car. The walkway was thick with ice, and slick on the surface.

Rock Creek, the river on the way to Sam’s school, was frozen. In some places it was a beautiful, pale, opaque blue. Even the waterfall was frozen over.

I saw a video of someone running across the Potomac, somewhere between the Georgetown Waterfront and the Watergate Hotel. In the video you could hear the dunk-dunk of the runner’s feet on the iced-over river. It was surreal.

I went to the supermarket in the car and managed to keep my balance lugging heavy bags over the ice to the front door.

We’re both feeling a bit better, but coughing like crazy. Sam’s school has given him a mask to wear in class.

Day Eleven

Tuesday February 3

This was the break in the weather: the first ‘warm’ day since the storm. When I woke up it was minus one, with a low of minus six.

There was some strong sun today.

Parking in partial slush is easier than parking on ice, but sometimes the wheels spin and sometimes the car veers.

I saw a video of a dead person being pulled off the ice on the Potomac River near 14th Street.

I slept in the afternoon.

I ventured out in the evening.

On the way out after dinner, I met a woman with a fur around her head like a giant, sideways Alice band.

Day Twelve

Wednesday February 4

This was Sam’s first day of his new internship. It involved a lot of driving. Every two-way street is currently no wider than a one-way. It’s like driving in Cornwall, or in Kalk Bay in December. When a car approaches from the opposite direction you pull to the side where you can. Today, I drove into several piles of mucky slush.

When we left for school there was a Greyhound-type bus stuck diagonally across our road. A driver was out of his car, shouting, and the bus driver was shouting back. “I can’t go forward, man – and I can’t go back!” Another bus driver was on foot, trying to calm the situation. She came to talk to us. I asked her if she was stressed. “No. Just tired,” she said.

After one of today’s three drop-offs, I had to make several attempts to nest my car in some ice-slush mix. The first attempt – during which I thought I might be stuck, with wheels spinning – turned out to be successful, but illegal. In my second attempt I thought I’d humped the pavement. It was just ice.

Today, in the course of all my driving, a pedestrian glared and a male driver made some angry sign at me. While I was creeping around our neighbourhood in our car, looking for a parking spot while trying not to hit anything or anyone, I spotted my friend Christine. I rolled down my window.

“How are you?” I grinned.

“Over it!” she said. “Aren’t you over it?”

“A bit,” I said. “I am, a bit.”

Day Thirteen

Thursday February 5

I’m properly sick now. I’m off to the doctor at lunchtime.

The Subaru CrossTrek is a brilliant car. It makes me very happy to know it’s out there, ready to go.

There’s more snow forecast for the weekend.

It’ll be Friday night soon.

I plan to sleep a lot.