So sorry to hear about your wife. Best wishes for her recovery.
Which motivates me to sign on to your
@&$!?#% about snow -- whilst others here wax rhapsodic about a Hiawatha winter wonderland of snow shoeing, tobogganing, snowmobiling and hunting walruses.
Here is my memory of the snows of my youth growing up, as most people do, in cities and suburbs.
Within hours the snow was dirty and ugly and full of rock salt from the snow plows. There was no place to throw the snow off your buried car. You couldn't shovel it back onto the street or sidewalks, and there were little or no front yards to speak of. Cars would often be buried for days or weeks if temperatures didn't rise.
More in the country now, I have a 600 foot potholed, gravel driveway that is all uphill -- two football fields long, which no snow plower wants to service. Twice in my mid- and late-60's, when my 35 hp tractor was broken, I had to shovel the entire thing by hand. The last time, the largest snowfall in Connecticut history, it took me 16 hours over three days, resting my heart every five minutes. Think I wanted to go snowshoeing or sledding on my back 10 acres after that? Think again!
Or after many dangerous slips and falls on the constantly melting an refreezing black ice on my brick steps and paved parking slab.
Or after many high-rev failed attempts to get up the driveway every winter in my rear wheel Mustang and Magic Bus (vehicles with the drive trains god intended).
Or after spending four hours, as I did two days ago, freezing on my open tractor in whipping winds, cleaning off the buried tractor and four vehicles, driving backwards with a grader blade and then bucketing snow, and then knocking over my mailbox post.
And then shoveling the back deck. Trying to spread frozen sand. Tromping the sand into the house. Which is dark with no heat because the power is out.
Yes, the idyllic joys of living in the snow belt. If I were still a drinking man, which I haven't been for 32 years, I'd hoist a
@&$!?#% toast to snow . . . along with my middle finger.
Rant compleat.
