When the lake’s in the air, you stay home. Or at least I do, because I didn’t choose an occupation that directly saves lives and there was a travel ban. The kids were home too – four snow days stacked onto Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day made for an unexpected week off while the city dug out. My area received over five feet of snow in a few days, and we weren’t even the hardest hit.

It had been a week of wind storms, followed by the lake effect snow. We’d look out our windows to find opaque curtains of white, shrouding our house, making the exact appearance of the house across the street a mystery except for our memory. Sometimes the soffits buzzed from the wind. In the first few days, the fierce wind seemingly blew the snow elsewhere. Then it started landing, in feet of fluff. Mercifully fluff! Shoveling the heavy stuff gives people heart attacks.

Lake effect snow is a practice in meteorological inequity: some get all, some hear stories. The clouds follow the curve of the lake and go across the region in bands. If you’re under that band, you’re buried. As much snow as we got (around five feet), my group texts and message boards shared how Hamburg, Blasdell, and West Seneca were consistently buried under even more. Those who live north of the band got a Hallmark movie appropriate accumulation.

Will was interviewed by Channel 4 early in the storm. The film crew caught up with him as he was snow blowing the block’s sidewalks. I’m the woman wearing bike gloves and holding a yellow shovel, digging and digging and digging. The news crew was wandering our street, doing a story about South Buffalo.

“The City of Good Neighbors” is my favorite self-fulfilling prophesy. Research often finds that a common enemy is so good for group cohesion. Winter snow is that universal foe. Everyone is outside trying to clear the snow and we help each other push out cars or snow blow. It’s what we do.

I feel like relationship are more atomized than I recall them being when I was younger. The internet makes it easy to find people of the niche that you belong to too. People of randomness and people of difference are harder to connect to. We don’t always know people just because they were there.

Neighbors are the people who are there. Buffalo’s sidewalk and front porch-saturated architecture makes meeting people easier to. Are you walking by? Are they walking by? You say hi to the folks on the porches. I know the smokers the best. And during snow storms, we talk because we are all outside. This is also a relationship of affinity in its own way: socio-economic status and an inclination towards the city. But with exactly one exception (gal I went to college with), I never would have met them if they weren’t my neighbors.

Will does the sidewalks sometimes with the snow blower. So does my neighbor two door’s down. The fellow who owns the pizza shop on the corner helped push out many cars. My neighbor across the street has a pickup truck with a plow attachment, and he creates a giant mountain of snow in the vacant lot next door clearing his driveway. This hill delights the children – my kids put a snowman on top of it. He cleared heavy stuff from the mouth of our driveway and I am very grateful for that.

My oven’s ignitor died during the storm. We had three loaves of bread ready to bake too: two sourdoughs and a focaccia. These all take days to make. I messaged my neighbor, a fellow baker, asking if she’d be willing to let me borrow use of her oven in return for keeping some bread. Shoutout to her: she said yes. The kids and I carried the Dutch ovens, glass dish of focaccia, and bowls of boules two doors down. It was heavy. I sat on her couch and hung out with her and her boyfriend while they baked. It was a lovely time. We’re interconnected if we let ourselves be. I could have thrown the bread out.

Hopefully today the replacement part arrives. Hopefully tomorrow the kids go back to school. Life resumes in some semblance of normalcy. As I shoveled, I was reflecting on how we don’t leave the snow in the driveway and on the roads. All this work is so cars can keep driving. We’re not going to scale our lives down to what we can walk to. We do the same things no matter what the context is, our adaptations aimed at maintaining the same hum of society, always at the same pitch.