My First Prairie Hurricane

 I attended my first hurricane last night. 

Okay, it wasn't a hurricane so much as a snowstorm—but it had hurricane-level winds, they said, topping out at 126 km/h. I believe them. It sounded like an airplane flying around the streets of the city, like something that could bust through your window at any moment. At around 11, a friend texted me a picture of a huge tree that had, only yesterday, been standing in their front yard, but was now resting contentedly on their bedroom.

I tried to go to sleep after that, but we have trees too. So I began to do that thing Barclay loves where I shake him awake every three minutes to run worst case scenarios and show him all of the terrible things I'm seeing on Twitter.

He loves that.

Eventually, though, he became harder to wake, and soon, even when I could wake him, he wasn't coherent, so I had to doomscroll alone. 

But then! Something kind of delightful happened. I was scrolling through the #SkStorm hashtag on Twitter, where people were doing the usual storm Twitter thing—posting pictures of the damage they'd incurred so far and Tweeting at Sask Power that they were having outages. Then someone mentioned that they were starting to feel worried about their house blowing over, and someone else was like, "YEAH I'M TERRRRRRIFIED" and soon there were a whole bunch of local people (myself included) comforting each other and freaking out together and clucking our virtual tongues at the fact that our loved ones were sleeping through the storm of the actual century.  It felt weirdly old-timey and small-towny, but in an on-liney sort of way. 

The internet has not been a place of connection this year, not the way that it once was, but last night from about 11:30 to...2? 3? (I honestly don't know) it was, and that was nice. 

I leave you with this screenshot from SaskPower's Twitter account—an important reminder that Christmas trees make great paper airplanes.