Lake Effect

One of the wondrous things about living in Cleveland is that there are two distinct sides - east and west. Everything is different about these two sides including the weather. The eastern suburbs, where I have lived all my life, are blessed with something we like to call "lake effect weather". Here is what happens: some sort of weather comes waltzing down from a northern state or country and dances its way across Lake Erie. While it is over the lake it gets thrown around like a chicken breast in a bag of Shake and Bake. Then the bag unceremoniously dumps its contents on the eastern suburbs, usually in what we like to call the Snow Belt. Here is a poem I wrote a few years back about such an event. If it's a warm sunny day where you are just get down on your knees and thank Someone.

It snowed all day on April 24, 2005

in spite of the fact that I was wearing

my flip-flops and would be doing so

straight through October, no matter what.

My feet literally free of

winter's ponderous burdens.

Easter was long gone and we

were wearing white again.

That day and the next

remains of daffodils did not peek

out of the snowdrifts with happy faces

reaching towards the sun

but were splattered and flattened into

soggy piles of mud and ice.

Hardwood boughs broke, pines and willows

were amputated of every appendage.

I saw the pink of magnolias in full bloom

fill the bed of a truck. The yellow forsythia

swooped to a ground view they had

never seen before.

Baby leaves were murdered and ripped

from their nourishing twigs.

Yards littered in wooden crisscrosses, like

giant toothpicks or as in a game of pick-up-sticks.

There was no electricity or school

as we waited for power lines

to be disentangled from leaning towers

and aberrant formations.

The next day is was 50 degrees and the melting music

of thumps and thuds and power saws played all day.

In a battle on the Northcoast

of Ohio, the trees lost.