Last winter, my home of Portland, Maine was transformed into an eight-week nightmare of parking bans, dangerously low temperatures, and the churning burden of just making it through each day.

It may seem a trivial challenge — lots of snow — but E. J. Graft got it right in a New York Times article titled “Boston’s winter from hell”:

[F]or those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture. We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe.