The snow began about three pm on Friday, as predicted, falling softly at first. It fell all night, and into the next day. The initial soft dry flakes changed to tiny icy flakes, and the snow continued to pile up. It covered the streets and the sidewalks, the patios and decks. It buried the cars and the shrubbery and all the outside furniture. It turned familiar landscapes into mysterious vistas. It fell for over thirty-six hours and deposited two or more feet to northern Virginia. It hushed our noisy world and stopped our usual lives. For a time, everyone turned inward to their homes and lives, cooking pots of chili and chicken stew, playing board games, binge watching television shows.

And then on Sunday the snow had stopped and the sun was shining, and people emerged to begin the big dig out, with shovels and snow throwers and leaf blowers. Plows were slow in coming, but people dug out their cars from the two foot snow caps that crowned them, and shoveled driveways for hours. Neighbors helped neighbors, potluck parties blossomed. Children and dogs frolicked in the snow, and as the snow grew softer, the children built snow forts and snow caves and sled runs. So did the adults. Gradually as the snow plows arrived to clear suburban streets, people were released back to their ordinary lives.

I watched the snow fall on my hilltop, and shoveled my walkways on the first night of the snowfall, and ran the snowblower on the walks multiple times even during the height of the storm.. I watched my world outside fill up with snow, until the tree stump that held the sundial disappeared and the woodpile that I had assembled for my fireplace changed into a small mountain of snow explored by the house wrens and English sparrows and chickadees.

When the snow stopped and the sun came out on Sunday, I, too, went outside to start clearing the snow from my truck, but I was in no hurry. I knew it would be a long time before the county snow plows cleared my country road, and then I would have to find a crew to plow my driveway. No rush. I had all the essentials—food, drink, firewood, projects to do, books, videos, cats—to be comfortable on my hilltop for days. I would be fine, I said to family and friends.

But today five days after the storm began, I realized what I have been missing deep in my heart: people. I have not seen another human face—not a single one— since I left the community center on Friday morning after my water aerobics class. That is almost five days. Thanks to the telephone and Internet, I have had communications with family and friends—telephone calls, e-mail, text messages, Facebook postings— but I have seen no one in five days. Such a difference to past major snow storms here, when Bill and I shared the adventure together, riding the storm out together.

I am isolated, due to this historical storm, and it made me think tonight about how people are isolated in other ways—by prisons, by mental illness, by the lack of friends. One of the worst things in a human’s life must be solitary confinement, and I am grateful that President Obama is making changes to that punishment for young people who are imprisoned. Humans are social animals, and cannot be happy alone. I now can better understand a person who might talk to a basketball on a desert island. I am talking to my cats, and to myself.

I am here tonight on my Snow Island on top of my hill, with gradually melting snow criss-crossed by the slender feet of birds, printing a delicate language that our brains think we should be able to decipher if we just stared a little harder, a little longer, and by the furrows of the deer, as they waded through the deep snow, and by the deep, widely spaced, prints of the red fox. The Snow Moon rises over the hill and casts its cold light over the drifts and the snow covered hollies and azaleas. I am grateful this is not a desert island, and I am not a castaway, and in a few days or so, I will see a human face again.