We get ice here maybe once or twice a winter, and it’s the specific kind of Southern-mountain ice event where the whole city more or less shuts down for a few days, not because the actual snowfall is dramatic by the standards of somewhere that gets real winters, but because nobody here owns the equipment or the road salt budget to deal with a layer of ice sitting on top of a grade this steep. My street sits partway up a ridge, and the main road down off it iced over completely for the better part of a week a couple winters back, which meant, practically speaking, nobody was driving anywhere until it thawed.

I want to be honest that this wasn’t a real emergency, nobody I know was in danger, the power stayed on the whole time, it was mostly an inconvenience dressed up as an adventure. But it did produce a specific, small version of the thing I keep circling back to in my own reading, which is what a neighborhood actually does when the normal infrastructure of daily life quietly stops working for a few days. My actual neighbors, most of whom I otherwise wave to and nothing more, organized themselves within about a day into a loose, unofficial system, someone with a generator running an extension cord to an elderly neighbor’s fridge, someone else walking groceries up the hill for two households who couldn’t safely manage the ice on foot.

Nobody called a meeting. Nobody posted a sign-up sheet. It just happened, the way these things apparently just happen, and I found myself thinking about it constantly while I sat trapped in my own apartment for four days with nowhere to be and nothing urgent to do, which if I’m honest is close to my idea of a decent week regardless of the reason. I read most of a very long book during that stretch, made a pot of soup last far longer than it had any business lasting, and watched a version of my own neighborhood I don’t normally get to see, one where everyone’s normal excuse for staying inside and minding their own business had temporarily evaporated.

The road reopened after five days and everyone went back to being polite strangers who wave from their cars, mostly. A couple of those temporary arrangements turned into something a little more lasting, though, the generator neighbor and the elderly one down the block still check in on each other now, ice or no ice, which might be the only actual souvenir that week left behind. I think about it every year now when the forecast starts mentioning ice, half hoping it happens again, mostly just curious whether the neighborhood would fall back into the same shape a second time.