Snow has been on the ground here for over two weeks now - the temperature was low enough to preserve former piles in shaded areas and on the northern sides of things. With the addition of fifteen inches of new stuff a few days ago, it might hang around for another couple weeks regardless of the predicted warmup over the next few days. A month of constant visible snow would be one for the record books.
Snow is a rare occurrence here and icicles are nearly unheard of, so I was pretty shocked to see a line of them on the entire front of my house. Some were about a foot long...
When I was a kid back in New York it would not be unusual for rows of four-foot-long ice daggers to grace the thirty-foot-high gutters of the houses in my neighborhood. We used to play an adult-endorsed game of knocking them down with snowballs. In retrospect, that was probably really, really stupid, but it had the benefit of relieving the roof-line of hundreds of pounds of weight before the shingles or gutters could be violently ripped off. If I ever catch my kid doing that, though, I will make him wish he had been brained by a fifty pound, fifty mph ice chunk...
As previously mentioned, we are three miles from the nearest plowed, sanded, and salted road. Volunteers with tractors and plow-blades (I saw four out over the past couple of days) do their best to clear the way to the highway but they don't have the resources to de-ice the roads as well as a dedicated crew would.
Making it even tougher to get around is the presence of about a dozen corn, peanut, and cotton fields on the way to the main roads. Usually, traffic drives down a street, packing and melting the snow a little and making it a little easier for the sun to warm the road in that spot. After enough cars have passed, two grooves have been worn in the snow down to the asphalt and its not all that bad to drive on. Near the fields, though, constant light winds blow powdered ice onto the road, instantly refilling and refreezing the slightly melted areas into three-hundred-yard-long ice rinks.
To further put a point on how bad it gets, I had to help the mail delivery person extricate herself from a ditch when I went to take the trash out yesterday. You know it's tough out there when someone who drives for a living is in trouble... I guess that's why, although the main roads are 100% snow-free (you would swear it never snowed), I had two paid days off. Awesome.
So what'd I do with my time?
The morning after the snow, I woke up early and shoveled and salted the steps, sidewalk, driveway, and made a path to the mailbox for the old man across the way. He's in no condition to do it himself, he has questionable decision making skills, and I didn't want to see a repeat of "The Nor'easter Incident", see. After that, I did my sidewalk and driveway and then went over to help my snow-shovel-less neighbors dig their guests' cars' out of their driveway. As odd as it sounds, it was nice to get out and do that work - I guess it's in the blood.
Surprisingly, the snow is still too crummy to make snowmen so we had to settle for snow angels. Mine are the large, intentional ones. My two-year-old's angels are small, ill-defined, and face-down. Hey, you try walking around in butt-high snow...
This snow, he learned that wearing an ice-encrusted scarf sucks, but riding down the slide of his playhouse into a soft snowbank is awesome. I learned that his ironically named "Arctic Cat" electric vehicle is terrible in ice and snow. The plastic wheels just have no grab at all, so it was mostly me and the wife pushing and pulling the thing up and down the street while the boy did his darnedest to steer us into a ditch or mailbox.
The tree and all the inside Christmas decorations have been taken down. The lights will be taken down Friday after most of the snow and ice is gone. That day, I will also cut up the tree and burn it in the firepit, roasting the chestnuts that didn't get cooked on Christmas.
See? Told you. This post just ends. No final joke. No closing supposedly-trenchant insight. Just a dot at the end of this sentence.
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