Our neighborhood leader had the front page of the newspaper spread out on her coffee table, in case we needed more motivation. It showed a neighborhood in Natori, Japan, on fire. It was the day after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Before the alarm about the nuclear power plants being in trouble.

The meeting of our neighborhood disaster group had been set for a month. Given that we had been glued to images of terrified people running in the streets and a monster wave swallowing whole towns, plus a tsunami warning for our own west coast, the horrible timing couldn’t have been better.

Coincidentally, the first time we met at a party to put together an emergency plan was six months ago, not long after a gas pipe explosion in San Bruno leveled a neighborhood and killed eight people.

You don’t schedule earthquakes and explosions. The only thing you can do is try to be ready when one comes. Yet who gets enthusiastic about disaster preparedness? The notice for our neighborhood meeting went out to 20 houses on three cross streets in Sebastopol. Eight people showed, nibbled oatmeal cookies and took notes.

Marian, a no-nonsense hospital nurse and volunteer organizer, displayed her emergency bag which she calls her “bed bag” because she keeps it next to her bed to grab when disaster strikes.

In it is a hard hat, a pair of work gloves and sturdy shoes, so you can get moving and not injure yourself while you check out your house and then see about the neighbors.

I’d rather pack for a vacation and hunt down my passport than pack a bed bag that I’ll need if things go boom in the middle of the night.

I’d also rather go just about anyplace on a Saturday morning than a meeting.

But as Marian said “if you are a calm organized self today you won’t be a freaked-out self later.”

She once put out a house fire in the middle of the night and was grateful she already knew how to use a fire extinguisher. “Your head really fogs out in a crisis,” says Marian.

We went over guidelines for what to do in the first hour after a disaster, based on a plan called Map Your Neighborhood that started in Washington state. After you put on the gear, you check the gas line outside your house and shut it off if there’s a leak. (Hissing, smelling, the dial whirling like crazy.) You turn off the water at the house main pipe. Then you place the sign that says “Help” or “Okay” in your front window.

Do you know where your gas line is? Do you know all your neighbors? Can’t all this wait?

The day before what is now being called the worst natural disaster in human history, people in Japan were probably worrying about work, the kids and everyday stuff. I keep thinking about the woman on NPR who said that when she looks at her ruined town in Japan she says, “How is this possible?” And then she adds, “But we always knew it was possible.”

In Japan the earth slid and the sea poured in. And then things got even worse and people in a 19 mile radius of a nuclear power plant were told to seal themselves in against radiation poisoning.

It’s about 19 miles from where we live to Bodega Bay and the San Andreas Fault, which would have had a nuclear power plant perched on it had residents and activists not stood up against PG&E 50 years ago.

I could report to my neighbors that we already have earthquake supplies in a clean garbage can with tuna and toilet paper, flashlights and dog food. And a drum of drinking water, urged on us by a retired fire captain who said at the very least have a water supply so you’re not a burden to rescuers helping people in real trouble.

A man down the street said he has a chainsaw and a woman two blocks over knows CPR. We’ll meet again in May and hopefully we won’t need another reminder. But now my husband and I own new hard hats – $13.95 at the hardware store.

When the red-eye to Boston landed I looked out the window and chirped “it’s snowing!”

“Yesss,” groaned the women next to me, obviously immune to my delight. Big deal, snow in January.

I should have confessed I have a strange snow lust. Tell her about how every January I start to worry about winter passing me by. If I haven’t yet managed to talk someone into going to Tahoe I feel deprived. It’s a lost season if I make it through winter without digging out thick wool sweaters or needing a pair of tights under my jeans.

Yet it is unnecessary for me to sit in coastal California and long for snow when I know people who live where winter is true and cold. That includes my sister in Massachusetts which has been walloped by continuous snow storms, record low temperatures and having what she calls “a real winter winter.”

I called her during one white-out and she said she couldn’t see out of any window in her house. I sighed with envy and asked if I could come for a visit. Sure, as long as I took the shuttle from the airport. Another storm was on its way and she wasn’t driving into Boston.

The weather gods delivered. The newspapers complained about another nasty blast of winter. TV interviewers talked to dreary locals about how sick they were of snow. But it was just what I wanted.

The beach down the road from my sister’s house was covered with unmarked powder, the salt marsh an ice sculpture, the clam flats frozen over. We drove up to even snowier New Hampshire and the White Mountains into a white-on-white world that looked like a photo spread in Yankee magazine.

I snow-shoed beside a river as snow sifted through birch trees as fast as fog sweeping through the redwoods. I threw myself into a snow bank and made a snow angel.

I trace my shivery needs to growing up in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Winter meant rolling around outside like a baby bear, trussed up in snowsuits, skating on ponds, sledding down hills. All the fun stuff. I moved to California in my 20s, apparently before I’d had my fill of snow and ice and before winter became a grown-up hardship.

Come November I start decorating the house with snow images. I stick museum postcards of snow scenes in the mirrors. A picture of a woman dancing in the snow is on the bookcase. A photo of a woman doing a yoga pose by an icy lake on the bathroom wall. My Google home page has a scene of ski trails through trees. Top of my seasonal playlist is Sting’s “If on A Winter’s Night.”

I recognize the miseries of those who work, commute and shovel their way through a prolonged winter. I was only there for a week but I know about chapped lips, flat fly-away hair and dry skin. I suffered from leaky boots and inadequate head gear and caught a cold probably because I went on a sleigh ride in a ball cap instead of one of those dorky wool hats with ear flaps. Or maybe it was sitting in the snow in a hot tub.

Yet, I think that a “real winter winter” must be good for the psyche. It toughens a person. Makes the blood quicken. Snaps you to attention. The raw cold and the icy beauty is a sharp reminder that mother nature, even when fiddled with, is still the boss.

The morning I flew from Boston temperatures were creeping toward zero. Six hours later we landed in San Francisco where temperatures had been weirdly warm in the 60s. The flight attendant said it was now safe to remove our down jackets.

It was fitting that on a November weekend when the temperatures soared into the record-breaking 80s I was at two events where we were reminded that care-taking the environment is up to us in this most green corner of the universe.

As Ann Hancock from Sonoma County’s Climate Protection Campaign said, “If we can’t do it here, where will it happen?”

That was at the Peace and Justice Center dinner where Ann was honored for her environmental leadership. Ann used to be in real estate but wanted something on her tombstone other than “sold houses” and now is all about getting individuals and businesses and local governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. She calls climate change the preeminent public health issue. She says that climate change, “unchecked, will swamp all other issues.”

The next night Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, away from Washington and back in earth-friendly territory, said pretty much the same thing, that we need to keep the green light on, given how Washington is filling up with global warming and climate change scoffers.

Green-wise, California triumphed against giant oil companies in voting down Proposition 23 that would have turned back the state’s climate change efforts. But it didn’t come through with new money for state parks which would have been funded by an extra $18 on vehicle registration fees. Sonoma County did, however, vote for the measure.

Lynn Woolsey was at a dinner for LandPaths, a greenie group that helps acquire private land for public access, builds trails, puts on hikes and finds ways for people to not only get into the outback but help maintain it, seeing how there isn’t enough public money or rangers to do it.

The LandPaths people talked about the importance of having not only good ways to get out into open spaces but a place to sit and take it all in. They call it a “sit spot,” where you might prop yourself on a rock or a piece of beach and just be quietly alone in nature.

I was thinking that the scoffers and disbelievers and even those who think we can put environmental issues on temporary hold could all use a sit spot. Take off those business suits and shiny shoes and pull on some hiking boots and maybe those funny looking pants that zip off into shorts and give themselves a time-out. It wouldn’t necessarily change their politics but it might give them renewed appreciation for clean air.

One Land Pather said that being in nature was more than a luxury or a right. It is also a need. The other day I took an early morning bike ride on a county parks trail. The air smelled like vinegar which probably came from fermenting grapes, apples or over-ripe compost. There was also the not so faint perfume of cow poop. You could bottle it, color it green and call it Aroma Sonoma.

There were joggers and bicyclists and a group of school kids. A homeless guy with his life in a grocery cart. A slow-moving couple, one pushing a portable oxygen tank. A woman sat alone on a bench. She could have been looking for rain clouds or coming up with a poem. Maybe wondering what she was going to do about keeping her house or finding another job. Or maybe she was just in her sit spot.