What Lake-Effect Season Does to My Reading Pace

If you’ve never lived on the lake-effect belt, the short version is that Erie can get more snow in a single weekend than some cities get all winter, because the lake stays warm enough into November to keep feeding moisture into cold air rolling off Canada, and the result is bands of snow that can drop two feet on one side of the city and nothing three miles over. I’ve lived here my whole life and I still check the radar every morning from October through March out of habit more than necessity at this point.

Site inspections mostly stop or slow down hard once the bands start rolling in, which means my actual job gets quieter right when I’d normally have the least free time otherwise. Nobody’s pulling a building permit in a whiteout, and the complaint calls that do come in during a bad stretch are mostly about ice dams and roof loads, which I still have to go look at, but there’s less of the routine stuff that fills a normal week. What I noticed a few years back, and confirmed once I actually started keeping the paper log, is that my reading pace roughly doubles from November through February compared to the rest of the year. It’s not subtle. I can look at the log and see the exact week it kicks in most years, right when the first real lake-effect band hits and doesn’t quit for three days.

Part of it is obvious, more hours stuck inside means more hours with a book open. But I think there’s something else going on too, something about the specific quality of the light during a heavy snow, that flat gray that comes through the windows even at midday, that puts me in a different reading mood than a bright afternoon does. I go for denser stuff in the winter, the Foucault and the Latour type of book that I don’t have the patience for in July, and I go for lighter stuff in the summer when I’m mowing and doing yard work between site visits and don’t want anything demanding waiting for me on the couch. Deb’s noticed this pattern too, she says she can tell what season it is by what’s sitting on my nightstand without checking a calendar.

This past November hit especially hard, one of those stretches where the plows couldn’t keep up and half the county just stayed home for two straight days, and I got through more pages in that single week than I usually manage in a month during summer. I’m not complaining about it exactly. Snow is fun and shoveling is not, and I’ve got the arms for both parts of that sentence at this point, nine winters of driveway work will do that to you. But there’s a specific, slightly guilty pleasure in watching a band roll in on the radar and knowing, with real confidence, that the next three days are going to be quiet ones with a book in my hands.