Snow Panic!
By Eydie Wight
Last weekend all the weathermen, both national and local, seemed to agree that we were in for a major snowstorm. Maybe 6-10 inches. At least for our part of the world that seldom sees snow before January it was a major storm prediction. Whether (weather?) from global warming, cyclical temperature shifts, or just plain old quirky Mother Nature, our winters have, in recent years, been mild. I know this, but still I seem compelled to prepare like it’s the coming of the next ice age. I know there are all those jokes about people running to the grocery store before a storm to buy milk, bread, and eggs. Never mind that they don’t eat milk or eggs often, it just seems to be the magical combination for snow. It snows, the whole county has French toast for breakfast the next morning using their fresh eggs, bread, and milk. Me being me, I already had all the groceries we would need. (I keep enough food stuff on hand to pretty much survive a season, even if the milk would be powdered, the bread homemade (and darn yummy too!) and the eggs bartered from the chicken lady who lives down the road.
Now, I’m the first person to laugh at myself. I know how somewhat obsessive my essential nature is. So, I could sort of understand the reaction Sammy got when he arrived at his work (the snow hadn’t started there yet) carrying, what one nurse fondly termed, “a barrel” of food. In my mind, we might have gotten a blizzard, and he might have had to stay at work to cover extra shifts if the roads were bad, and his co-workers might not have been as prepared as he with extra food, and they might not have brought money to buy food, or the hospital might have run out of food and I wouldn’t want anyone to have to resort to cannibalism…
For his twelve hour shift I packed: a gallon Ziploc half full of cereal, a package of pop-tarts, a sixteen ounce bottle of milk, a small can of pineapples, a small can of mandarin oranges, two wedges of soft Swiss cheese, a half bag of butter flavored pretzels, six pieces of fudge (peanut butter and chocolate), two cokes, a ginger ale, a Fanta orange, a turkey breast sandwich, a small salad with bleu cheese dressing, two steak rolls, 14 homemade meatballs with red sauce, two Snack Pak puddings (butterscotch and lemon), an orange cut into sections, and a granola bar (in case of emergency starvation.)
Needless to say, Sammy‘s hospital got absolutely no snow before he left the next morning. My hospital got maybe an inch of snow. At home we had three inches of lightweight, fluffy snow. We got home safely and without having to dig our way out of any shoulder high drifts and then we slept for a few hours. Then we ventured out to “shovel,” or in this case sweep off the cars.
After checking on the shed cats in their warm and cozy space heater heated shed where they recline on old comforters folded over old pillows, and bringing a few wheelbarrow loads of wood from the wood shed to fill up the wood box inside the house, Sammy and I decided to take the dogs and walk up the ridge to enjoy the snow. It was light and powdery enough to blow from our hands as we scooped it up. Making a snowball was pretty much out of the question. Felon kept sticking his nose into the snow and eating big mouthfuls of it. Jasper romped and rolled and ran ahead. Both dogs followed the tracks of deer that crossed the access road. The footing was a bit treacherous due to the many small springs that come out of the ground and then freeze. With the snow cover it would be crunch step, crunch step, crunch step, whoa slip windmill arms clutch each other slip again, crunch step.
Up at the top of the ridge we stopped by the tree stand. There are sight lines cut along the top of the ridge and in lines down the front and back slopes of the ridge. Since the snow several deer and a small flock of turkey had passed by the stand and our old turkey feeder. There were still remnants of the ice storm from a couple of days past clinging to branches of trees and they clacked in the slight wind. We heard the scree of a red tailed hawk in the sky above somewhere, and saw evidence that a woodpecker had been interested in a couple of the standing dead trees. We didn’t go far along the top of the ridge, we’d slept most of the day and at 4:00 it was already beginning to “gloom.” But, we got to watch the dogs wrestle with each other in the snow, we got to hold hands as we walked along the top of the ridge, and we had some lovely views of the ridges next to us.
Once home, I quickly changed into my pajamas and made us cups of hot cocoa. We pretended we were snowed in and I watched TV through the backs of my eyelids while Sammy surfed the Internet in search of political outrages to rant against. It was a good day.
The Weekend (Part #1)
By Eydie Wight
It’s been awhile since I sat down to ramble (why does that feel like I should be saying, “Forgive me Blog Master, it’s been a over a week since my last blog session…”
Absolution
“The Adventures of Eydie and Sammy Wight”,
through sweat, labor, and eye for detail,
has reconciled all things blog worthy unto Himself,
and sends you forgiveness for posts delayed.
He forgives your acts of procrastination,
and through HTML and supreme coding, applies his technicality.
In the name of future posts joyfully awaited,
You are now absolved from guilt and shame.
In the name of Blog Masters who seek timely content.
Amen.
So many things, as always, have been going on. This time of year is when we “put the property to bed” for the dormant season, prepare to crank up the wood stove, and, in my case, take the time for the luxury of fall leaf rides.
Our last weekend off had been, until Sunday, very busy. Pleasantly so. Friday afternoon I had finally found time to take a long proposed hike with my friend Gary. I arrived at his house about 2:00 and we set off. Gary lives on the edge (literally) of a creek that comes down from the mountain. His bridge over the creek washed away in a flash flood that came a couple years back. His new bridge is actually the frame of a mobile home that was dropped over the creek. He has the creek edge lined with water shaped stones and the bordering trees make music with bamboo wind chimes he makes. It’s a lovely spot.
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We set off for our hike, across the creek, and started up an old logging road. We went up, and up, and then a fairly flat switchback, and then more up, another switchback, up again, switchback, up. I had to stop several times, making no pretense of stopping to look at the beautiful fall scenery (although I DID look at the beautiful fall scenery as I was panting and sweating) and then finally the road started to level out at the top. I was content with the conversation we were having about religion, spiritualism, and nature, and the different plants Gary was pointing out. Imagine my delight when the top of the mountain opened up to a large, grassy, cleared space that offered a vista of the Juniata River way down below. It was incredible. We sat on a couple of benches the owner had strategically placed and took in the view. Two hawks circled below us. A train, looking for all the world like a child’s toy, made its way down the tracks. We were above the world of the Friday rush hour traffic we could see on Rte. 322. We sat there, took some pictures of the view and of a flowering plant neither of us could identify, and started to make our way back down to civilization. I noticed a tree that I thought at first was a hickory, but when I examined one of the nuts I found an easily opened shell containing a multitude of whispery seeds. We took a picture and Gary later identified it as a “nuisance” import, a Royal Paulownia. Interesting.
Saturday we finally finished getting the wood stove ready for it’s first fire. We haven’t had that first fire yet, but we’re ready. I took the stove pipe off, scraped the creosote from the inside, and blacked the pipe with a rub on, buff off stove polish. Last year our insurance company had sent out a survey with the very casual question, among fifty others, of did we have a wood stove, fireplace, or pellet stove. I answered yes. It was TWO DAYS later that I got a call saying a representative had to come to our house to assess the safety of our stove. I managed to put that little visit off for about a month and then was informed that my homeowners insurance might be canceled without the visit.
Hardball. The little gal arrived an hour earlier than she had arranged and I was (you guessed it) running around in my pajamas cleaning so that she would know I was conscientious and diligent. She had a little clipboard and she informed me that my stove was not allowed to set atop a potentially unstable platform of bricks, that it must have a firewall drywall behind it for a certain number of feet, and was I aware that I had no smoke alarm in place. Now, the smoke alarm point I agreed with and I was pleased to show her my TWO battery-less smoke alarms that were sitting on the work table. The stove had sat where it was for fifteen years and had never jumped from the bricks. Sigh. Establishment doing it’s job for the betterment and safety of us all. Last year, after her visit, we had bought the firewall. We just hadn’t installed it. So, Sammy did that, and went to the local hardware store and bought several wide flat concrete blocks to set the stove on. I started blacking the stove, but then son Roger came home and I sent him up on the roof with the chimney sweep (the device, not a soot blackened small boy we keep on hand) to clean out the chimney. I’m not so good with heights, so I stood on the lower rungs of the ladder so that the strength of my prayers that he wouldn’t slip and fall off the roof would wash over him in waves of maternal concern. At one point the chimney cap began to slide down the roof and even though my eyes were seeing a chimney cap, my heart was seeing a blond young man in shorts, tennis shoes, and a Zeiderelli’s pizza shirt skittering past me to certain death.
Let me just interject here that if Roger had eaten a salad before going up on the roof, I would have had no worries. We used to call our mother “the salad pusher”. She used to worry. A lot. She still does but modern medicine is a wonderful thing and she is more laid back in her worrying these days. She used to worry herself through a series of events that would always end in a death scenario. For example: “If you aren’t careful reading that book you’ll get a paper cut and then you’ll go out to play in the dirt and it will get infected and then you’ll become septic and you’ll die.” But, salad was the ultimate health food. Brother John and I can both remember not even wanting a salad, saying no when it was offered, and then somehow finding ourselves with a huge half eaten salad in front of us, fork in hand, and NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EVENT. To this day I respect the supernatural healing powers of my mother’s salad.
I also had Rog help me empty the large ash can from last year. We should have emptied it after the last fire last year when I should have also cleaned out the stove. (Conscientious and diligent, remember?) During the winter we empty the ash can onto the shady part of the driveway to help melt the ice that always accumulates there. Now we were ready for fire. Warm, toasty fire. Unfortunately the temperature was a balmy seventy degrees that weekend.
I’m fairly sure I was a dog in a past life. (I’m also fairly sure I was a Native American medicine woman, the housekeeper of a large Scottish manor, the girlfriend of a traveling troubadour in the Middle Ages, and a fiddle playing Irish immigrant stonemason.) Stories for another time. (Brother John here… Most of my past lives ended in tragedy, but I know I was a majestic flying Eagle on at least one of them). But, as I said, I was a dog. Or maybe several dogs. I love to ride in the car. (And roll on the ground and have my head petted and probably some other stuff that dogs do that we don’t need to go into here.) One of my favorite things to do is to have a day when Sammy and I can take the cameras, a couple beers for me and a Coke or ginger ale for Sammy, some homemade Chex mix or pistachios, some tootsie roll pops, and my topographical map of Pennsylvania, and go for a ride. Often we go for a short ride in the evening and chase the sunset, or wind our way around back roads on the way to or from town for errands, but every once in a while we take an entire day and travel someplace we’ve never been before. I’m convinced that we could travel Pennsylvania roads for the rest of our lives and never see them all. We don’t have a destination other than “someplace we’ve never been before” or, in the case of our last Sunday off, “north and up”. The map is for when when it begins to get dark and we have no idea where we are but would like to head home. As of last Sunday, our local leaves had still not turned their glorious fall colors. Actually we may not have a glorious fall here. The weather has been unseasonably warm and dry and a great many leaves seem to be skipping color and going straight to brown.
Our goal was to head north where the weather has been a bit colder, and head up into some of the higher ridges. One nifty feature of our car is that it has a compass. We started out on back roads, trying to keep to a generally northern direction. Most of the roads we had been on, but we enjoyed seeing big red barns full of hay, soybean fields sun dried and ready for harvesting, Amish traveling in buggies on their way to church. We took an inviting side road that bordered Penns Creek and it was as if we had traveled back in time. Old stone houses with hand pumps still in the front yard, tobacco barns weathered to pink, a young horse rolling in the pasture to scratch his back, and a young Amish boy with a fishing pole leaning over a bridge. Then, as the afternoon started to wane, we reached the foothills of the Bald Eagle State forest. The leaves were so bright Sammy said it looked as if they were glowing. Reds, oranges, yellows. The yellows had outdone the others this year in my opinion. We traveled some one lane roads and some dirt roads and each ridge line was more spectacular. At one point we stopped at the intersection of a dirt road and a road that ran along the base of a huge ridge. I said, “GOD’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” We started home, now heading south and west to follow the sun. I love “ridge skipping” as we drive. Pennsylvania has long ridges in many places instead of individual mountains. The only way to cross most of these is at “passes” which are natural breaks or dips in the ridge line. Early settlers and Native Americans would have crossed the ridges in the same way, knowing a “pass” would save time and energy. I’ll look along the ridge as we drive and say, “Head west toward that break, probably a road goes through there.” And it usually does.
The Adventures of Eydie and Sammy Wight 