i've been up off and on through most of the night, checking on the snow. at 5:30 i called the college and got the inclement weather message: all classes, day and evening, cancelled. a plow came by on the main road in front of the house soon after that, and i have seen a car or two come by since then. people in the upper midwest or new england would die laughing at how people down here panic at a little snow. there may be four inches out there, and everything shuts down. it is supposed to become freezing rain about now, however, and that will be much more dangerous. mainly because people don't know how to drive on icy roads. i'm mostly glad the p.m. classes are cancelled; last winter one of my p.m. students had a bad accident on black ice on his way home from class, totalled his car. i felt somehow responsible, even though i'd let them out early because of the ice.
so here is our message from mother nature: stay home, drink tea, make lentil soup, watch the birds at the feeders. i filled them all yesterday afternoon, put the heater back in the birdbath, put suet in the baskets. there's a grey squirrel who is managing to get most of the suet blocks, no matter how far out of reach i think i put them. he, or perhaps she, can hang on to a branch by one toenail and grab pieces off the block with front paws, munch away. in my secret heart i have to admire this determination.
it will be light pretty soon, i'll be able to see how much snow there actually is out there. it looks like enough to go x-country. if only we still had skis. i think G has a set in the garage; i sold mine before we left massachusetts. the boots had about disintegrated and we didn't know where we would end up settling after the time in the motor home. (which is a long story from our life that i might just try to tell here someday.) and seven years later i still don't have new skis. there's a beautiful place nearby, Redden State Forest, that would be heaven to spend the day on skis. we walked there with the dog after a big snow last winter, breaking tracks in the snow, the first and only humans in the big woods.
3 comments:
I've never lived in a place where it snows so all this winter wonderland talk makes me wanna head for Big Bear. Hopefully you won't get too much.
Four inches? People here would think that was a catastrophy! They close the schools here if snow is PREDICTED! Having grown up in Ohio, I try not to feel too smugly superior to the natives :)
We're getting another day off tomorrow, although the weather is now saying the worst will pass us by. I still don't understand WHY they don't try to PREVENT those power outages we get here all the time. That could still happen tonight, but they don't sound so panicky on tv anymore!
Isn't it funny how the mid atlantic region reacts to a little snow. If it's predicted here there's a run on milk, eggs, and bread. You'd think we were going to be snowbound for a week - not a couple of hours. And it makes me crazy how they cancel school as the first flake falls.
Post a Comment