 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Snow-Ho-HoFebruary 12, 2010 It snowed Tuesday night, not as much as it was supposed to, though. As one of the newspapers had it, "Northeaster Snubs Northeast." It did slam the mid-Atlantic area, including D.C. Having lived through two monster snowstorms in Washington, 1979 and 1981, as I recall, and knowing that the city just got almost two feet on top of almost three in the last week or so -- well, it's hard to imagine just how bad it is. Well, as they say, that's there and I'm here. Here we got more than Boston did. Guy on the Boston-based radio station I listen to all the time, WUMB-FM, said it took him five minutes to shovel out. Here it took longer than that. I didn't bother to shovel Uhura Mazda out in the morning because the crusty snow was frozen to all her windows. My feeble ice scraper was getting nowhere, Travvy's leash was in my left hand, my snow shovel was up on the deck, and (most important) I didn't have to go anywhere till late afternoon. By then the sun had done most of the work. The snow isn't deep, maybe three inches, but it's heavy. So heavy that it hardly drifted at all despite the high winds Tuesday night. It's hard to walk in. Wherever it's been compressed by car tires it's slick -- I wore my Yaktrax this morning -- and everywhere else it's crusty, but quite firm enough to hold me up. But it's beautiful to look at. Trees are striped with snow from tips to trunk, the lines so smooth they might have been painted with frosting or shaving cream. Barbed wire looks like strings of popcorn. The young oaks behind the school look birches if you approach from the north; from the south the gray-brown bark is bare and they look like oaks. And as with the snow we had at the beginning of January, it isn't melting except in direct sunlight. P.S. I forgot the part about changing the battery in my smoke alarm. The thing is on the high ceiling next to my west-facing window. I can't reach it without the stepladder, which is parked out on my little deck. For several days it had been bleeping that its battery was low. My first trip up the ladder, I found that the battery was a 9-volt. In my drawer I found AAs, AAAs, and Ds but no 9Vs. Yesterday i remembered to throw a 9V battery into my grocery basket. I moved my desk chair, the object that looks like a small easy chair but is really a crucial part of my filing system, and my scanner and went out to get the ladder. Every step of the ladder was crusted with snow. Even after I brushed it with my hands, poked it with my shovel, and let it fall to the deck, it still had some icy snow on it. I brought it in anyway and set it up. I climbed up and stood on the next-to-top slippery step and proceeded to wrestle the old battery out, the new battery in, and -- by far the hardest part -- the alarm back into its hole on the ceiling. All, mind you, with my hands above my head. I fantasized the newspaper headline: West Tisbury Woman Breaks Neck, Dies in Fall from Stepladder; Was Trying to Fix Smoke Alarm. The old battery had fallen to the ground, provoking the interest of Travvy the malamute who has been known to eat rubber gloves. I vaguely recollected hearing a story about a dog that had died from eating a battery. From the top of the stepladder, the battery looked as far away as cars on Route 128 look from an airplane. Besides, Travvy was now ignoring it so I did too, or tried to. Finally the alarm stayed snug in its hole. I climbed down the ladder, took it outside, came back in, and pushed the furniture back into place. The alarm is no longer bleeping. The green light is on. It's working. I think.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||