Growing up mostly in Arizona, winter weather has always been somewhat of a fantasy for me. I would hear people use phrases like snow drift, mud room, spring cleaning, snow blower, and snow plow, and I had no idea what they really meant. I would say to myself, “Wow, that sounds like fun. How cozy to live in a place where you cuddle up inside while the snow falls outside.” Then I moved to Connecticut.
It snowed last night, which was exciting. Jake and I were hoping for at least 12 inches because we’re still in that “the bigger the storm, the better” stage. My visiting teacher called at about 7:30 this morning to tell me church was cancelled, throwing us into the “How cool! Something was actually cancelled due to snow!” stage. It continued to snow throughout the morning and into the afternoon. After doing the little cutesy “bake some cookies to take to the neighbor” thing, I decided to shovel the walks so we could get out tomorrow morning. I did learn from the last snow storm (only 6 inches) that it’s harder to scrape off once it all settles. At first it was fun.
Tate was playing around me and I was pitching shovel-fulls of snow at him. Then I started getting tired.
Tate got stuck in a three foot high snowdrift and had to be rescued,
I got snow in my pant legs and started to lose feeling from the knees down, I fell taking cookies to those neighbors,
and Tate lost a glove which made him scream, “It hurts! It hurts!” After that, Tate wimped out and went in to watch cartoons, while I headed around to do the front yard.
By this point, my internal body temperature had reached the low 100’s and my face was starting to resemble a beet. After shoveling the front steps and halfway down the walk (which is long enough to land a 747),
I couldn’t move my right arm any more and I was fighting not to hurl in the snow.
Meanwhile, my lovely husband was watching from the window, taking pictures and pointing to spots I’d missed. Very helpful man, that one. Once I’d quit, I went into our mudroom (yes, we have a mudroom! When we moved into this house, I thought, “How cute! I’ve never had a mudroom before. What a fun place to store our shoes. Kind of a waste of space, though”) and started to peel off my layers. I was sitting in a pile of Tate’s wet clothes and all the snow that he and I had tracked in, my bum getting wetter and wetter as I sat there. I didn’t want to track any into the house, so I opened the kitchen door and flopped over onto it like a walrus on an iceberg (my legs were still trapped in the tangle of snowpants and boots). It then took about 30 minutes to regain a normal body temperature and fleshy color. Jake finished up the walkway in front and our neighbor used his snowblower on our driveway (He’s a saint. Plus I think he saw me out there trying not to hurl). I passed out on the couch with Lucy, who was too big of a chicken to ever come out, and we took a little nap together.
When I woke up, I thought, “Well this is a nice Sunday after all, together as a family enjoying the peace and quiet.” Then I looked outside and noticed it had snowed another 6 inches on my freshly scraped walkways.
The snowplow had come by and thrown several feet of snow onto the driveway, which will become ice tonight, making it impossible to leave if we don’t scrape it up now. @#$&* snow!!!!
My mudroom smells as though rodents are using it for conventions, mixers, and other socializing. My car has a thick layer of mystery debris on the floor that won’t get vacuumed until spring because it’s too cold at the gas station to open more than one car door at once. The whole house has a musty old-people smell to it from being closed up too long. Everyone here has only ever seen us in our big puffy winter coats. My windows look as though Big Foot himself licked them after enjoying a tasty muskrat snack. And you couldn’t get me out there with a bottle of Windex for all the hot cocoa in the world. It truly is a winter wonderland.
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