Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
When the e-mails started, I’m not sure.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten the snowman,” said a friend of mine, who has sent me his share of e-mails — including the photo of a church with a sign out front that says, “Whoever is praying for snow, please quit!”
The header on the snowman e-mail says, “How Can You Tell When People Have Had Enough Snow?”
Several other folks have sent it to me. It shows a snowman standing on a park bench under a tree, and there’s a hangman’s noose around his neck.
Another e-mail says, “It’s so cold I saw a Democrat with his hands in his own pockets.”
And there was a weather map like you would see on TV, with the caption “Major Winter Storm Impact.” One zone said, “These people should hit the liquor stores,” another said, “These people should buy a boat,” and one that included this area said, “Anyone who lives under this bubble is totally screwed” — which we were.
That e-mail came two days before the 31-inch snow that covered the 24-inch snow we received a few weeks before.
I’ve had to shovel my porch roof, which gathers the snow that’s funneled off my main roof by the gables that house my attic windows.
I don’t actually go out onto the roof to do this. For one thing, I’m 62 and old enough to know better. Besides, I’m shoveling the porch roof to take weight off it and see no reason to add another 230 pounds (that’s including 10 pounds of clothes and boots) to the load it’s already carrying.
So I open a window, stick the snow shovel out and fill it, then carry it across the room to dump it out another window where there is nothing but yard below.
It was a nice change, last weekend, not to have to shovel snow. Having an entire weekend to clear out my sidewalk and driveway is a luxury, compared to what otherwise would be the necessity of digging out overnight so I can go to work.
So far, I haven’t had to worry about snowplows covering my sidewalk after I have shoveled it clean. The snow has been piled up so high beside the area of sidewalk I’ve cleared that it forms a nearly insurmountable wall.
The Saturday of the last big snow, I shoveled out from my house to the garage and left a three-foot high wall of ice and snow in front of the driveway, figuring I would tackle that on Sunday morning. Church had already been canceled, so that wasn’t a problem.
I came out on Sunday morning to find that the gentleman who was driving a Bobcat to clean the sidewalk and parking lot that are used by the church and the doctor’s office next door had cleared out my driveway.
He was still at work, so I went over and thanked him.
The day before, my shoveling exercises became a virtual social occasion.
Several of my friends who had been able to get out drove by and stopped in the middle of the street to talk. This is on Route 220, where during good weather the traffic is so heavy that it’s frequently stopped moving in both directions.
Two of them are sisters I’ve known since high school. I asked where they were going on such a horrible day.
“To get some beer,” they said. I whooped, clapped my hands and said, “Good for you!” and they waved and drove off.
Having done what I considered a sufficient amount of physical labor for one day, I went back into the house, took a shower and then went out onto my back porch to relax for a while with half of a cigar and a couple of fingers worth of bourbon in a juice glass.
The phone rang and I went back inside to answer it. It was one of my two friends, the sisters.
“We looked for you,” she said, “but you were gone. We honked the horn and you didn’t come out.”
I said that’s probably because I was in the shower and didn’t hear them.
“Go out and look in front of your car,” she said.
To my pleasant surprise, I found a market bag containing four strawberry daiquiri coolers. Much as though I was tempted to do so, I refrained from drinking them all at one sitting. They are absolutely delicious.
It hasn’t all been fun. During another bout of Global Warming that delivered several more inches of snow, I got halfway home from work when the CHECK ENGINE light came on and the engine started missing.
After I made it back to Keyser, I called my garage, which is 20 miles away in Cumberland, and the service man said to bring it in the next morning.
I said I would try my best to do that, then began 18 hours of looking forward to making that trip during a storm in a car that I didn’t entirely trust to get there.
After charging my cell phone, putting on my long underwear and most substantial winter overcoat and asking for what a friend of mine calls “travel mercies” in his prayers, I made it to the garage without incident.
The problem was fixed, and I actually spent a pleasant day at work until I got home and discovered that my sidewalk had drifted shut with two feet of snow. First time in my life I ever had to shovel my way into my house.
Even when it isn’t snowing, I still have to shovel. That’s because the piles of snow that line my sidewalk are slowly shrinking, but are doing so in a fashion that causes them to creep out across the walk and narrow my pathway. They’ve been around for a while, so that’s not surprising.
Just like middle-aged people, middle-aged snow banks tend to spread out at the bottom.
