I avoid using the word “unprecedented.” (I just think it could use a rest after millions of us let it fly into the air so often and persistently during that time we had for a while, remember? You know, that one thing that starts with “p-” and ends with “-andemic”?)

Suffice to say, this month has been a doozy!

Our fine city was one of many across the country to host extreme weather. For us, it meant an unplanned extension of the schools’ winter break and a total of four snow days—and counting.

The school schedule may have been spotty, but work was still happening. The business of life still needed tending to. In my particular household, we’ve still somehow been fumbling through the aftermath of all the colds we’ve collected this winter.

Meanwhile, the world just outside the window got dangerously cold and icy and windy and slick.

It has made for some looong days.

Our daughter had an extended winter break from school last year, too: ahead of a storm, the district called off the last day for December. It was a free Friday, a jumpstart on the time together at home. The school had already turned that last day of the term into a “pajama day,” so from her perspective, the snow day was mainly a change of venue

So halfway into January, we were rolling from a two-day work week (read: the kid-free portion) into an unplanned five-day* weekend (read: the kid-present portion). Those days were a certain kind of a blur, but a pleasant-enough blur.

Or, at least, it was what it was.

So how did I spend this precious blur? My time included playing card games inside a blanket fort and scrubbing hard water and paint stains from a sink.

A few of the hours were spent out front, scooping snow and scraping ice.

I stood on the porch on my birthday, watching sunset going pinker and deeper as 10 minutes of the most picture-perfect, fluffy snowflakes fell.

I hid from my family in plain sight. I was tired one morning and spent 45 just-because minutes before lunch on the couch under a blanket with my phone. (They knew I was there, for the record. My husband even threw some clues my way from the crossword he was working on. I didn’t come out, though.

I worked some. I caught a few meetings, of the work-work and the sober-work variety.

At various times I yelled and moaned and snapped at the dog and at my loved ones. Sometimes I ate when I was hungry, and sometimes I didn’t and just sort of plodded around from room to room.

I read great books and I played mindless games on my phone.

A few days into that weird weekend, we got the last of the Christmas and Hanukkah stuff and the winter decor back into totes and tubs and boxes. Then I vacuumed the floors.

Making those passes across the carpet, our living room was as good as a Zen garden. I sent the vacuum forward and back, forward and back. All the little lines appeared along our path, and I thought, “What if this is it? What if this is just the point?” And I felt calm. Like there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to do.

Being here with the vacuum, tidying what by any definition could be called our “family room,” is life. It’s not a distraction from life. And it’s not some unfortunate reality I must grin and bear.

The “grin” of “grin and bear it” fame, by the way, comes from grinnian: Old English for snarling, for showing your teeth as in pain or anger.

I’m not going to stop to look it up now, but five bucks says it shares a root with the word “grind.” I’m here to tell you that I refuse to wear myself down to dust in the face of life. I don’t think we’re made for that.

“Grinding is for coffee beans,” as my father would say.

A few of these January weeks have felt mightily atypical, but what week is typical? It’s all just life. It’s not “life + all this other nonsense that gets in life’s way.”

How can I be here for it all, open-hearted? At the very least, I can try to ride along with it, and I can refuse to pile onto life’s challenges.

After all, piling is for snowplows.

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*This total changed on me as I started drafting this post. The windchill out there has been no joke, and the schools are not messing with it.

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