Greetings, friends. (XII)

Greetings, friends. Everyone talks about the weather, and finally we are doing something about it.

That’s a play on an old, old joke, and I wish it were actually funny. It actually makes me want to crawl under the covers and sob.

I’ve lived on the West Coast for 15 years over the course of my life, most of it in the City and County of San Francisco. Naturally, with the Bay Area’s distinctive climate, the subject of the weather comes up a lot in conversation, especially when you work exclusively over Zoom with people all over the country.

Especially when it comes to snow, or San Francisco’s utter lack thereof. In the twelve years I lived in San Francisco, it never snowed once. But I grew up in Philadelphia, and I’m well acquainted with snow. I loved snow as a child. School got canceled for the day, you could go out and play in it, go sledding, build snow figures, make snow angels, throw snowballs, the works.

My love affair with snow ended when my parents made me start shoveling it. I think I was about 10. It’s not an unreasonable chore for a child about that age, shoveling snow. It’s just that it combined two things I have always hated — repetitive, physical labor — with a third thing, wet cold.

Sure, I got cold sledding or whatever, but at least that was fun. Shoveling snow just plain sucks.

I remember one day I was out shoveling in a blizzard with my dad, and I complained to him that the snow was falling about as fast as we could shovel it off the front walk.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dad said, or words to that effect. “If we don’t shovel it now, it’ll be twice as difficult later.”

“But why bother in the first place,” I probably muttered, while I scooped up another shovelful of the wretched stuff.

“Because if we don’t, the snow will turn to slush, and become even harder to shovel. And then the slush will turn to ice, and someone, probably you, will slip and break their scrawny neck. And then I will be very sad.”

“Also,” he probably added after a weary pause, “if you stopped complaining and focused on shoveling, you’d be done sooner.”

Well, now I am 45 years old, and I am staying in the overly large, overly old, and above all, impressively drafty house owned by my mother. I have sort of become the de facto custodian of the house while we wait for the New Hampshire Circuit Court, 6th Circuit, Probate Division to “grind slowly, but exceedingly fine”.

And, while I’m here, I need to be able to get around in my lovely new-to-me pickup truck, to run errands hither and thither, and for that, I need to be able to extricate the truck from the driveway. I am a grown-up now, at least sort of, and that means shoveling the drive.

It snowed here, starting last night. It snowed like we were trapped in a snow globe and some giant, celestial-sized toddler was taking us for a spin. It snowed like the inside of a tropical drug lord’s sinus cavities. The stuff was just absolutely everywhere.

I actually am not going to blame this on global climate change. A foot and a half of snow in 24 hours is perfectly normal for New Hampshire in January. It is one of the many reasons I do not live here.

I went out and started shoveling at about 10am, right when I would have rather been writing this journal entry. The neighbor across the street was already huffing and puffing away with his kid and a pair of shovels when I got out there. He was busy carving out a path to both our mailboxes. I hailed and saluted him for a gentleman and a scholar.

The snow was already in drifts a good 8 or 10 inches high, on top of the foot that had already been on the ground. It took me probably 45 minutes to clear a path to the driveway, and then to clear out the driveway, and then to go in and get a broom and sweep the foot of snow off the roof and hood and the sides of the truck, and then to widen the path to the driver’s door, so that I wouldn’t slip and break my scrawny neck, to use my father’s quaint phrase.

At this point, one of the town’s road department plows came up the road, and I could see the pity in the driver’s eyes as he swerved slightly towards the center of the road, to avoid fouling my handiwork. As it was, the plow dumped a good six or ten shovelfuls back into the foot of the driveway. By the time I got that cleaned up, I swear there was another solid inch on the roof and windshield and hood of the truck.

By the time I got that cleaned up, I was determined to celebrate by going out and paying a teenager to draw me a latte, before I sat down to my computer for a day’s work. Naturally, I had been too conservative in my shoveling, because I had already strained my lower back something good, and I backed the pickup straight into a snow drift.

Thank God I was able to buy a truck with four wheel drive. In point of fact, this was precisely one of the reasons I had gotten such a truck. I was able to extricate myself, but by that point another plow truck had stopped in the road to let me pass, and, presumably, snicker at my shenanigans.

This was probably the most foolhardy latte I have ever tried to procure. Epsom was basically a ghost town, except for the plow trucks endlessly circling. I pulled up to the drive-through espresso joint at the traffic circle, because this is New England, and of course there is a traffic circle. The place was seemingly deserted. There was no one at the order window.

I pulled up to the pickup window and could see figures working away inside. I honked my horn gently. A cheerful looking kid came and opened the window.

“Are you open?” I asked hopefully.

It turns out they were. The pressure cord that announces the arrival of a new customer in the drive-thru had simply been too buried in snow to activate. The kid tried to give me my latte for free. I insisted on throwing $5 in the tip jar.

I went back out twice more in the afternoon to continue my Sisyphean labors. Each time, at least another six inches awaited me. Basically, when I wasn’t either working or cooking or eating today, I was shoveling snow. Remind me again why we haven’t already abandoned New Hampshire to the libertarians and the wolves?

On the upside, I got to tick off the half-hour of cross-training scheduled in my race training plan today.

I need to start writing in the mornings again, though. It feels a lot more like a burden when I have to spend my evenings making good on my commitment to stick with it.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re drier than I am. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See you tomorrow!