Most of us turn out to be more self-reliant and resilient during emergencies than we think we are. Natural disasters bring social and economic disparities and injustices to the surface.

One gets to know neighbors better and to appreciate their superior snow-removal skills. You develop more empathy for people who live alone and may need help medically and emotionally.

If you have access to internet, you can reach out to friends you’ve neglected. You may have more characters than you thought in your life’s drama, not as many perhaps as in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale,” but more than are trapped in Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Too much time without social interaction can make one feel as isolated as Robinson Crusoe without the compensation of being on a tropical island. Even worse, you may feel like Tom Hanks without a soccer ball in “Cast Away” (2002).

At the same time, being housebound for a while may evoke meaningful introspection, even if it reveals that you’re ethical batting average is below .300.

You may lose cherished evergreens, if you’re fortunate enough to have them.

But you then have more opportunities for replanting more exotic varieties in the spring after you’ve visited a botanical garden and researched the possibility of nurturing a banyan tree on the edge of Lake Erie.

Friends and family at a distance may assume you’re buried in a snowdrift and panic if they call and there’s no answer because of a power outage.

But when they find out you are alive and were looking through old copies of National Geographic and planning a trip (if you can afford one), they will be pleased that your adolescent and dehumanizing desire to see sparsely dressed Tahitian women may be realized, if only as a fantasy to be revised.

You may not be able to watch your favorite TV program, but you can read a relevant poem such as Robert Frost’s poetic drama, “Snow.”

Let me quote some lines:

… hear the soft bombs of dust

It bursts against us at the chimney mouth,

And at the eaves. I like it from the inside

More than I shall out in it….

Not everyone has had the privilege of studying Robert Frost’s poetry or being in a room warm enough to read comfortably but try going to a library when it warms up and enrich the experience of being housebound in winter by seeing it through the eyes of America’s most influential 20th century poet.

You will be honoring my late mother who said the aim of education was to “make one’s life more interesting, and that’s likely to happen when you look at nature through a poet’s eyes.”

Not everyone has been safely “inside” through this “Bomb,” but some have had the aesthetic pleasure of seeing “a lamp sends its gleam across the snow” through the window of a living room with a fireplace (“Paige’s Horse,”1889 college song).

Only recently did I realize that the lamps in this song were celebrated because they helped drunken Amherst College students return in the snow from failed romantic missions with laced-up Edwardian co-eds at Smith College.

Those who now snugly can watch snow sparkle in the moonlight should think of the needy at this time and try to imagine an America with less distance between those who have a hearth and those who need a Space Heater.

University at Buffalo professor of English (retired) Howard R. Wolf doesn’t recommend reading Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” or Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” to anyone stuck in a house during a blizzard or bomb cyclone. They don’t have happy endings. Irving Berlin may be helpful, but Robert Frost is even better.]]>