People in Glass Houses [antikvár]

oneV. . . Fat feathery flakes falling steadily from a dazzlingly white sky with no wind, mantling Port Meister's houses and streets like Christmas two months tardy, weighing down and bending the boughs of the pine forest east to Big Elk and beyond to the first fang-toothed peaks of the Adirondacks above the timber line.That was the snowstorm all day Friday."If she starts in blowing," they said in Port Meister, watching critically the flat gray smface of Lake Ontario, "if she starts in blowing we're in for it."And soon after four o'clock that afternoon the barometer fell again, the sky darkened to the color of slate and the wind began to howl oflF the lake. By four-thirty it registered thirty knots at the weather station on Lake Street and the Masters Company whistle shrieked to dismiss the factory workers an hour and a half early. By five o'clock the big snowplows were called in from the state highway south to Watertown and north to Ogdenburg and Massena, for the wind was piling snow across the pavement in great drifts faster than the steel blades could clear it."I'd hate to be out there," they said, snug in their houses in Port Meister, watching the blizzard, the real blizzard now that in hours could pile the drifting snow fifteen feet and higher, and that swirled past the double glass of their storm wmdows like white smoke. Almost everyone in Port Meister, unless he was thinking of the fast ski runs up near Big Elk after the storm ended, thought the snow was a pain in an obvious part of the anatomy.1