Relative Something

This year reminds me of what winters were like when I was a kid. When the snow season arrived, it stayed all year. None of this melting to the point you could see grass in the middle of January or February, or one measly cold spell when it dipped below zero and that was it.

This morning we woke to teens below zero and it is no big deal. It’s funny how you get used to it. At first, it seems like serious cold, but after days and weeks of it, with times when it dips well into the twenties below and involves wind that drives the impact into danger zones for exposed flesh, well, you grow weary of focusing on how cold the temperature is and just deal with it. Life goes on.

Unfortunately, details of daily life activity that you are trying to just get on with start to get complicated after weeks of accumulating snow continues to pile up. Driving gets difficult because sight lines become obscured by mountains of plowed snow that get piled up where ever there is a place to pile it. Shoveling driveways and walkways become epic efforts, tossing the snow ever higher to get it over the mound created by the previous six times you just did this.

It took me until yesterday to finally finish clearing all the new accumulation that fell last Thursday. I had tried making my way out to the wood shed for a load of firewood and in one trip exhausted all my energy by trying to forge my way through the deep snow. I realized this passageway should be added to the queue of areas needing to be cleared after every snowfall. It is no longer sufficient to just trod the route to create a path.

It reminds me of what it was like as a kid. I thought maybe it just seemed like there was more snow back then because I had shorter legs, but with the return of a winter like days of old, with uninterrupted snow and cold, I’m finding it just as difficult with longer legs.

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