Ellen Baron is a wife, mother and grandmother who has had three distinctive careers:

1) as an editor at an educational laboratory;

2) as a businesswoman who ran a private-label group at Black & Decker, and then served as Director of Marketing for a consumer electronics start-up company; and

3) as an academic administrator who was director of a post-baccalaureate business program.

Her 'Just Jobs' (as opposed to "Careers") included piano teacher and French tutor (her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis having been in French).

Now retired from both careers and jobs, Ellen serves on the Maryland State Attorney Grievance Commission, as well as the Boards of several non-profits. She has lived in England, Switzerland and Germany, as well as St. Louis, Boston, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and, now, Baltimore, MD.

It began innocently enough.  At eleven a.m. on Friday, February 5 a staff person from the Baltimore Museum of Art called to tell me that all weekend activities, including the special tour I had registered for, had been cancelled.  The outside thermometer read 37 degrees, and the skies were blue and cloudless.  “And if the predicted snow doesn’t show up, will it be back on?”   “I’m afraid not”, she said.  “Not after we’ve made all these cancellation calls.”  Well, I thought, we can catch up on our movie-going tomorrow night instead.  At noon, the temperature outside had dropped to 35, and a barely perceptible snow mist was falling.  But it wasn’t sticking.  Nonetheless, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where my husband works, decided to close at 1:30.  As the afternoon wore on, the mist became a gentle snowfall, the temperature fell to freezing, and the white stuff had begun to cover the lawn, the deck, and the driveway.  The back of our home is mostly glass, and there are four sky lights over the family room and the breakfast room.  Looking at the sky and the clouds rolling by through them is a constant pleasure.  As dinner-time approached, the snow, heavier now, had piled up on the skylights, and our view of the now ominous clouds was totally obscured.  The snow was also piling up, at the rate of three inches an hour, on the deck, the front porch, the walkway to our front door, in the backyard and in the driveway – everywhere.   We watched with astonishment as this freak event unfolded.    

The eleven o’clock local news that night had reports from its staff stationed all around the city.  The “mantra” was the same from all of them:  “Please stay off the roads.  Driving is very dangerous.  This promises to be a storm of historic proportions.  We will be back on the air at 4:00 a.m.”  My husband and I tend to stay up late.  We finally settled in for the night at half past midnight.  We were reading, as is our wont, when the lights went out.  “That’s lucky”, I said.  “At least the power didn’t go off during the day, or in the evening after dark.”  I spoke too soon.  Before the end of this storm, we would lose power four times all-told – twice for several hours and twice for an hour or less.  All but the first outage occurred during the day, or shortly after the sun had set.

We awoke Saturday morning to an accumulation of twenty-two inches of snow.  The meteorologists were saying that the storm would continue until ten o’clock that night.  All day long we gazed in awe at nature’s handiwork as the snow kept falling and falling and falling.  Fortunately, my husband had filled the birdfeeders in the back yard, and the birds gathered there by the dozens, eating and chattering.  Every once in a while a male cardinal would join the crowd, and his bright red plumage was a stark contrast to the white, white, white landscape.  Twenty deer appeared later that Saturday, desperate to eat the scattered birdseed.  Charles Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest was playing out in front of our eyes.  But aside from the birds and the deer, our view of the world was reduced to only snow:  snow piling up on the ground and the snow coming down from the heavens.  The two seemed to have fused into one huge elemental force.

At ten p.m., when the meteorologists had predicted that the snowfall would end, it was still coming down.  Each hour, my husband or I would ask one another if it was still snowing.  The answer was always the same, as it was when we went to sleep at one a.m.
When we awoke at 7:00 a.m. Sunday, the snow was no longer coming down.  There was 30 inches of snow on the ground, on the deck, on the roof.  Ten-foot-long icicles hung from the eaves.  And life as we knew it had ceased to exist.  Outside, the city resembled a frozen post-apocalyptic world.  No sound, save our Vermont wind chimes on the deck.  Not a car on the road.  No roads even!  Local businesses closed.  Local governments closed.  Even the Federal government was shut down.  Inside, no heat or hot water.  No electricity.  Candles and flashlights provided the only sources of light.  Layers and layers of clothing gave some warmth.  Nature had reduced us to an elemental existence.  All the accoutrements of a modern society were useless. 

We had two days “off”, and then the snow began again.  Only this time the snow was accompanied by blizzard conditions – a total whiteout, preventing even emergency vehicles from reaching the people who needed them.  By Wednesday night another twenty inches of snow had fallen.  A storm of historic proportions, indeed!

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