Like most Lake Oswegans I was hunkered down for a day or two last week due to the snowstorm with lots of time to think. These are the lessons I came away with.

• Life in the fast lane is over-rated. With no place to go and no electricity to fuel our normal distractions, we ended up doing what a lot of Lake Oswegans were doing—reading, playing games, talking and taking walks. Won a new convert to the card game our daughter gave us for Christmas called Exploding Kittens. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but try it—you’ll be a convert too. Bottom line, we all felt recharged despite the absence of any electrical juices running through our home.

• Don’t always believe what you read. According to Sperling’s Best Places website, the average annual snowfall for Lake Oswego is 1 inch. That might come as a big surprise to a newcomer arriving during the middle of our 10 inch snowstorm on Wednesday. As we all learned in some version of a How to Lie with Statistics class, averages don’t tell the whole story. Which is why I dissuade clients from relying too heavily on national real estate sites like Trulia and Zillow. It’s always best to get your information as close to the source as possible, like from a Realtor who lives where you’re thinking of moving, or even from this blog if Lake Oswego is on your sights!

• We live in a community of folks who care. Neighbors checked in. On our walks, everyone we passed left us with the greeting to, “Stay safe.” Neighbors without power were taking advantage of the kindness of neighbors with power by coming over to shower, eat, and sleep. And all of us developed a much deeper appreciation for the PGE repairmen and first responders who placed caution strips to warn us of downed power lines and worked 24/7 to get our power back on as quickly as possible.

• There is another line that divides us. When bad weather wreaks havoc in our everyday lives, it becomes very apparent there is another way we are grouped that differentiates us. Those who are prepared and those who are not. You know, the neighbor who just kicks on the generator and doesn’t fret about the leftovers spoiling in the refrigerator. Or the guy who has the snow shovel and diligently scrapes his walkway and driveway clean (and maybe his next door neighbor’s too) by the next morning. And the folks who actually have window scrapers to peel the snow off their windshields compared to the rest of us who wield dustpans, spatulas, and anything else that resembles a flat edge just to create a peep hole big enough so we can see what’s straight ahead.

• A picture is worth a thousand words. Despite the inconvenience and the frigid temps (both outside as well as in our homes the longer the power was out), the snowfall showed Lake Oswego in a beautiful wintry glow. And for that, I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

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