When Bostonians talk about snowmageddon , they are probably referring to the bear of a snowstorm named Juno, which dumped But in retrospect, Juno was the easiest part of that whole snowpocalyptic month or so that defined the winter of When Juno passed, my husband and I jumped into action. I shoveled the steps and whisked snow off the porch of our Dorchester home with a plastic broom, while he ran our cheerful green electric snowblower around the driveway and sidewalks, spraying crystalline fountains in the morning sunlight.
Then nearly 17 more inches fell a few days later at the beginning of February , and another 14 inches a week later. It was too cold for the snow to melt between storms; it just slouched onto its haunches, getting denser and icier. Still, during those first storms, there was an agitated pleasure to cocooned life. We were both working from home, so we tapped keyboards in sweatshirts and pajama pants all day and huddled with the cat at night, listening to the vinyl windows of our old house gasp and quake.
It was a lifestyle that, in retrospect, prefigured life during the COVID shutdown five years later. But eventually, the stolen pleasure of snow days wore off.
And then came a deep freeze. Ice dams loomed at the edge of roofs all over the neighborhood. I whacked thick icicles from our eaves with my broom handle. We bought a snow rake, a device I never knew existed, to prevent damage to our roof. I developed new shoveling techniques to fling snow higher, until I could no longer clear the top of the piles in our yard. The snowblower shorted out. Sick of home, I found a deal on a hotel downtown just so we could escape for a night and cook ourselves in a hot tub.
Around us, sidewalks became icy canyons; most people simply walked in the street. People were killed by snowplows. On March 15, three more inches of snow a dusting! The event was grimly celebratory β Bostonians like nothing more than to be superlative.
