Winter

Good Grief Charlie Brown! Where has the month gone? I have just turned the calendar to March and realized that I have a blog due in the morning! Oh dear? What to write?

I guess I could write about the weather. It has been extraordinary this winter. When you think of last winter and all the snow, we haven't even had a winter, at least here in Virginia. However, last week we did have a quick snow storm, right on the heels of 70 degree days. Today the temps rose to 81 degrees. Very strange. Is spring here?

Maybe not. The snow last week reminded me of a snow storm we had in the late 80's. One Saturday morning in April my girlfriend Gayle, who lived around the corner, called and woke me up saying, "Get dressed! Hurry! Its snowing! Lets go to Hardees for biscuits before it gets too bad!"

I grumbled and replied "How bad can it get Gayle? It's April!"

"It's snowing like hell!" she answered.

Well, we set out to go to our nearby Hardees, three miles away. The trip going wasn't bad. We had no problems at all. We had taken two boys with us, one of my boys and one of hers. Both were around twelve and old enough to send for help if we should find ourselves stuck or anything. And they had to eat too!

Coming home was a different story. It was indeed snowing like hell! We had to drive down a road named Long Hill Road, for obvious reasons; it was a long hill, a slow decent for the first half and then a slow assent for the second half.

Now I taught driving for many years and I know how to drive in the snow. If only others were so experienced! As we rounded the curve where the downhill part ended and the uphill part started we were greeted with what looked like a demolition derby. Cars going too fast for conditions slid around the curve and lost all control of their vehicles. They were sideways, turned around, tilted into the ditches, plowed into each other and the road was completely blocked.

I eased to a stop and we discussed what to do. The road was very slippery and we decided it would be a simple matter to push the ones in the road down the side street we were near, a road called Williamsburg West. We told the boys to come on, lets get to it! They thought it was great fun! And so did I!

By now traffic was backed up on either side of the blockade and we had a lot of help. There was much laughing and camaraderie, the kind that happens when strangers find them selves in the midst of a situation. It didn't take too long to clear the road and I told the boys to get behind the car and give it a shove to get me going up the hill.

As soon as I was moving I realized that I couldn't stop to pick them up. All the way home was up hill! But it was only about another mile and they walked that far everyday, so I hollered out the window "Stop at the Seven-Eleven and bring some hot chocolate!" Gayle and I laughed so hard at treating our boys so bad.

We made it home and rushed inside, nearly frozen from being outside pushing all those cars and getting wet. As I had a very inefficient heat pump, we got my hair dryer out and took turns blowing ourselves dry and warm. Soon the boys showed up with the hot chocolate. We had a fun day, laughing at all those cars now parked on Williamsburg West and how the residents would most likely be put out when they found they couldn't get in or out.

All in all, it snowed twenty inches that day. In April! Gayle and her son went home that afternoon and my son went with them. I snuggled up in a chair with a book and the hair dryer and prepared to spend the evening reading. About 6:30 the phone rang. I answered and was delighted to hear the voice of a guy I had been dating for a few weeks. We talked about how strange it was that we had such a big snowfall, where we seldom had more than an inch or two, and so late in the year. As we were preparing to hang up he commented that it could have been a much better snow storm if he could have come over and gotten snowed in with me. I asked him why, he was a good driver I thought he could make it. He replied that he would have but some idiot had pushed a bunch of cars up their road, Williamsburg West, and they couldn't get out.

Sigh....