Blizzard: The Sky is Falling

We are watching the weather, not on tv, but outside our window.  It is illuminated by the streetlight on the edge of our yard.  We cannot see the houses across the street, not even their mailboxes.  A few times we have been unable to see the streetlight's glow or even the branches of the tree right outside our window.

Unaccountably, I'm thinking of sand, of deserts during sandstorms, or of the stream of sand in an hourglass, or of sediment swirling in water.  Or of black clouds of swarming bees.  Or locusts.  Or dark sooty smoke from a big fire.  The snow is black, not white, in this light. The air is solid.  The sky's ceiling is right above our streetlamp.  It is claustrophobic.  And it is all yellow, the hue cast by the electric light against the surrounding snow.  This is not pretty, majestic gentle snowglobe snow but almost a living, breathing, powerful and possibly destructive entity.  The way it moves, up and down, sideways, and back upon itself which such silent force is serpentine. Watching it almost gives me vertigo, like an IMAX moving flying around.  Oddly, we can't hear the wind.  And no snow is hitting our room because we face south and the wind is from the north.  It's eerie.

And beautiful.  But not in a peaceful way.  Awesome, as in inspiring awe.  Terrific (well, not quite yet creating terror).  To use an art history term from Romanticism, it truly is Sublime.