tWO SidES Of WintEr

The accumulated snow on my porch roof has all but obliterated our view of the street below. There is little room left in our driveway for the disposal of the snow that has drifted down in and over our cars. Why don’t I put the cars in the garage? A garage, one that you enter from the house … well, that is something that can only exist in fantasies that include Cary Grant, Robert Redford and the loss of 40 pounds. Each winter morning is a festival of snow removal and mutterings that include some rather creative use of the language. My spouse, and I don’t know what he is trying to prove, refuses to use the snow blower on the driveway apron, preferring to shovel the stuff while I keep my hand near the phone and 911. I can hear him now, declaring that the snow blower can’t handle the “heavy stuff”…and he can?

I am remembering our first year in the house. There we were, naively beginning to attack what was a very long list of problemsextraordinaire on the inside. We never gave a thought to the outside and what happens when winter comes, the roofs are covered with snow and some of it melts. Fade fast to a relatively young and very inexperienced homeowner on the roof of the back porch, with an axe (not a hatchet …an axe … a big one,) chopping the glacial ice that was melting into the house, frighteningly adding to the list of “must do’s” without any idea of what to do. How cold was it? It was so cold that year that the blood from a cut that I deftly procured from said ice actually froze. I didn’t even know that I’d cut my hand until it defrosted.

I shake my head at my innocence and sigh because we still have the same problem … even with an assortment of solutions that have included wiring the roof edges. The latter worked for one year. Then the squirrels found the insulation around the wires too tempting for their educated palates and the wiring stopped working. We have a roof rake. We’ve bought stuff that you throw on the roof that is supposed to open pathways for melting snow and ice, encouraging the results to drip harmlessly to the ground instead of inside of the house. The results of all of this are cautionary examples of futility.

Before I go on, I have to check and see if the family room door has defrosted. Yesterday I discovered that ice had locked the door into its frame … Where is that axe?

But there are other memories that show winter in another frame. I can so easily recall teaching my thentoddler first born how to build not only a snowman, but also a snow fort, hauling forth my best memories