Let it snow!

There is a story about snow I'll never forget. This happened about two years ago.. or maybe it was three. Come to think about it, I think it was three years ago, because BigGeek was still in business school. So one cold day in February we had this huge ice storm. It looked lovely of course, the trees shimmering in ice-crystals, transforming the landscape into a regular fairyland, but the roads were not far away from being fantastic. Covered in black ice and very, very slippery and treacherous. So, on that day of the ice storm, I came home from work in the evening and spent more than two hours breaking the two-inch hard ice in our driveway and shoveling. It had snowed later that day, after the ice storm, so the ice was covered in snow, which had crusted with even more ice. All very nasty business. Chip was with his nanny and they both saw me from the warmth of a bedroom window, chipping the ice and trying not to fall.

Two hours later, the job was done and I was happy with the results. The walkway and the drive way were free of ice and snow and safe for walking. I headed inside and the evening followed its weekday routine, when suddenly at 11:00 pm, while I was in bed reading, I heard a knock on my door. It was Chip's nanny. She called me to a window and there we saw a snow plow, plowing the snow and ice until I realized that it was piling up all the snow right at the mouth of our driveway, blocking it. The nanny opened the window and yelled at him. He could not hear us. I ran down to yell at the driver, but before I could get out of the door, he had piled 3 feet of snow and was gone. We were snowed in.

I was too exhausted and it was nice and cozy and warm inside to go and work the snow again. I knew it was a bad move, but I decided to leave it till the morning. I woke up early next day and armed with my shovel, decided to get that wall of snow down. But over the night it had turned hard into a wall of ice. I attacked it furiously but managed only to get bits out here and there. This was turning into a battle of ego. Ice vs. Dottie. I hacked away at it with all my force, got a chunk out at a strategic spot, but my victory was short lived. I slipped on the black ice and fell. Hard. My ears were ringing.

The nanny saw me fall and ran down stairs but I told her to stay away. One person falling was enough. She begged me to get back in and wait for BigGeek to come home from school that evening and hack away the ice, but that would mean defeat, right? So I picked the shovel again and started to break the ice. Suddenly, my neighbor's teenage son was beside me, with a shovel. I looked up to see my neighbor at her kitchen window with a steaming cup of coffee. She smiled and waved. She had woken up her eldest son and ordered him to go help. How I envied her. There she was in her flannel robe, drinking coffee, ordering her sons to shovel driveways, where as my son was only one at the time. A few minutes later his younger brother joined us and between the three of us, the wall was all but demolished. There was a small hump, but I was certain, I could run my car over it.

I got into the car, revved it up and backed it out. It came to a halt with a loud crunching. The lump of ice had caught its underside. The car was stuck. It could neither go forward or back. We hacked the ice under the car, but it was a really hard lump. Soon another neighbor came out and started to help. Between the three guys, the lump was somewhat tackled. The second neighbor got into the car and ran over the lump. Hurray!!!

Ten minutes later I was driving to work, only to realize that I could only hear with one ear. The fall on the ice was not so good. Later that evening I went to the ER and they told me it was temporary and I should have my hearing back by tomorrow morning and I did, thank god.

But the only lasting impression I have of the incident is the image of my neighbor standing at the kitchen window, looking at her two sons shoveling. This Saturday we got four inches of snow. Chip looked out the window when he woke up in the morning and let out a glee and said "Aie, can I go and shovel the snow?"

From our backyard

The enthusiastic shoveler!!