Orlena was not the kind of winter storm you pop out for a coffee in

This ‘brutal nor’easter’ was quite a bit more than I was used to in the UK, and so we congratulated ourselves that we managed remarkably well, writes Holly Baxter

Hardy dog walkers were some of the few out and about as the storm hit (AFP via Getty)

On Monday, E and I were woken by the dulcet tones of the New York State of Emergency alarm. How they manage to do it is a mystery to me – I’m guessing it’s something-something-5G-something-something-George-Soros – but somehow, whenever a child has been kidnapped in Harlem or a tree has blown over in the Bronx, every phone in the city emits a piercing squeal and lights up at the same time. At 8am, as we enjoyed the last 10 minutes before we were due to get out of bed and back into the -8C reality of the New York winter, we were rudely awakened by this screaming pitch, amplified throughout the building by everyone else’s hijacked cellphone. The thump of someone falling out of bed in the apartment above and the tired yell of a woman next door added to the melee; two apartments over, the dog who barks if we so much as drop a fork in our own kitchen went crazy.

The cause of this emergency was what the world called Winter Storm Orlena and what the local news stations called an “especially brutal nor’easter”. San Francisco has its hurricane warning systems, and we have our snow-aversive phone tree. I opened our blinds to a swirling gale of white and a couple of poor dog owners shivering against the wind as their hardy Pekinese squatted over a snowdrift to do their morning business. Every 20 minutes over the next eight hours, the snow plough would come down the street, clear off the road, turn towards the adjacent neighbourhood, and then return 20 minutes later when the road was filled with 10in of snow again.

You’ve got to take the small victories, and living through a strong nor’easter comfortably counts as one, surely

This was not the kind of storm you pop out for a coffee in. Gates slammed and rattled, trees bent and people ran out every so often to quickly shovel away snow from their doorsteps before retreating back inside. Such extreme weather can catch expats off-guard: most Londoners will never have been snowed in before; most will never have received a phone call from the electric company, as a storm moves in, telling them what to do if the electric goes out for an extended period of time.

Thankfully, after a couple of years out here, E and I know not to underestimate the sudden wrath of the Brooklyn winter. In the hours before the storm was due to hit the northeast coast, we pulled our summer AC unit out the wall and got to work plugging any gaps it left in our window with Styrofoam and duct tape. We built a hidey-hole for our cat out of blankets in the most heated corner of our apartment, because feline welfare comes high on our agenda. And we invested, a few weeks prior, in a pair of duck boots each (leather boots with duck-like rubber feet, so you can get through ankle-deep snow in a pinch without your feet soaking through) as well as multiple pairs of woollen socks.

As we ate way too much of our stockpiled food and watched the snow fall off roofs outside and slam against people’s windows, we congratulated ourselves on a job well done. You’ve got to take the small victories, and living through a strong nor’easter comfortably counts as one, surely. Of course, if we congratulated ourselves in front of Canadians, they’d laugh us out of the room quicker than you could say: “Hey, I thought you were supposed to be the polite North Americans.” But compared to other residents of the US of A – Californians, for instance, or the Texans I once saw break down in tears over the New York cold during a Christmas outing – we’re still pretty hardy. Not as hardy as the kids who went outside at 4pm on Monday, while the storm was still in full pelt, built a snowman and then laughed as the wind exploded it into various pieces and slammed the pieces into their faces, no. But hardy.

I just won’t spend too much time perusing my friend in San Diego’s beach-themed Instagram this weekend after I dig my way into the building’s bin store with a trash bag and a spade. That kind of habit can really sap an east coaster’s morale.