Good Morning.
The blizzard over the weekend did not feature the charming, feathery stuff that falls in December. It made its intentions known by starting off with buckets of rain, complete with lightning, thunder, and hail that scared the dog into trying to wedge herself under the bedside table. The rain turned to sleet and then to snow sometime during the early Saturday hours with winds gusting to fifty miles per hour. When I got up, I stood in the front door with the dog on a twenty foot leash. She was completely oblivious to the wind and rolled in the snow with abandon. Blizzards are apparently more fun than thunderstorms.
I made some French toast with French bread, not the skinny packaged sandwich stuff, and topped each slice with butter, cinnamon, and sugar, not syrup. The dog got a bite or two and napped in various locations around the living room. I hunkered down and watched any form of television that wasn't completely mindless and duly noted the cancellations that crawled across the bottom of the TV screen, mainly Sunday church services. My neighbors to the north, a retired couple who are incredibly, alarmingly active, didn't even attempt to leave their home, and they're known to bundle up and do things that people half their age shouldn't contemplate. Even the mail wasn't delivered and we know from the slogan learned before kindergarten what that says about life as we know and love it. The weather was ferocious, not fit for man or eventually a Golden Retriever whose trips outside were shortly only thirty seconds in length. I set out candles and a lighter gun before I went to bed that night and put a flashlight in the drawer of the bedside table. I made sure the phone was charged and put it next to the aspirin I have nearby in case I have a heart attack. This is what some of us do when we sign up for Medicare: we
keep a bottle of Bayer at the ready. Others, not including myself, take an exercise class.
The snow stopped on Sunday morning at precisely 9:20. I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, surprised that I still had power and was nicely warm and toasty. The youth minister a couple of doors down, not needed at the cancelled service at his church but still wishing to spread some good will, snow blew everyone's walk on the block. The active retired neighbors were out in a flash in their parkas and boots, tromping around in the heavy, wet mess. My younger son and his family arrived around eleven o'clock; they had been visiting relatives around the state during my granddaughter's spring break, clearly a misnomer, and had managed to travel on the Interstate that had just reopened. The gates on I 90 and 29 are lowered two or three times during the average winter by order of the governor who knows, like the rest of us, that you don't fool around with blizzards. County roads cannot be similarly controlled, and there are always tales of people getting stranded, the luckier ones with candles, granola bars, and blankets kept in the trunk. There's nothing romantic about it, even for the twenty-something couple in the throes of something I struggle to remember at the moment.
My son and his crew brought me a vacuum cleaner because my seventeen-year-old model had finally expired in the middle of my office rug a few days before. Then they continued on their way to Chicago and I was back to more television, a couple of hours with some poetry I'm finishing up about the delights of becoming decrepit, and the hum of the snow blowers I can still hear without assistance. Walking is a different matter and vacuuming is what it's always been, a gigantic bore.
It is snowing again today, but I'm done talking or writing about it except to say that anyone who still thinks Mother Earth is happy about what we're doing to her is cuckoo in the head.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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