"I'll Get To It As Soon As I Can Get Off My Hill ..."

You can just make out the almost-buried picnic table.

.. as someone told me over the phone recently.  By that she meant whenever the snow stopped, the town plow cleared her road, the salt truck sprayed salt to prevent icing, her plow guy cleared out her driveway, and she cleaned the snow off her car--then she could get down her hill and put a packet in the mail to me. Such is life around here this time of year.  I live on a hill too and, yes, it takes a bit of doing sometimes to get out.

We've now had several storms with little let-up.  During one, as the snow kept falling, I watched the drama of a car that thought it could make it up this way but got stuck.  (I recognized it so knew there was an infant inside on its way up to its baby-sitter's.)  Blessings on cell phones. The driver called her husband at work who, after a half hour, managed to dig them out. And two days before that (in a different storm), the postman got stuck in the same place, left his vehicle, and walked up the hill to deliver the mail.

It's as if the weather channel just says, "Before we even tick off this current storm, here's the next ... and the one after that."

There was a point (only last week) when I decided being snowbound could be delightful.  Just staying in with cups of hot tea and silence as the snow gently persisted.   No traffic.  Food in the fridge.  A couple of good library books: James Knowlson's Damned to Fame, the Life of Samuel Beckett ... and Bill Buford's Heat, An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany. 

But now, after yesterday's storm that must have dropped another foot of snow--something like 18 inches was predicted--I'm definitely ready for spring ... when it begins making its fragile way up and down the hills.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917, born London, died France) wrote this:

Thaw

     Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
     The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
     And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
     What we below could not see.  Winter pass.



(I love this poem.  And fortunately it's in the public domain so I can share it with you.)