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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. Blood on the snow. A suburban winter's tale by J. G. Fabiano Enough! I sometimes wonder if I am the only one who is sick and tired of the winter of 2003! Anyone who has suffered through this winter has got to be exhausted by the snow, the cold and the winds but ask anyone who has lived here all their lives and they will tell you gleefully that we are experiencing a real Maine winter for the first time. I respond to this comment by pleading for a fake Maine winter. There is nothing more frustrating than to come home from a hard day's work and pull into the driveway with visions in mind of cozy slippers, a comfy chair and a warm - only to find that one can't pull into the driveway because of a snowdrift the size of a truck. Now, we expect snow in our driveway after a snowstorm. However, to come home on a sunny day in February, when not a snowflake has fallen, to discover that the winds of winter have picked up other people's snow from all over the neighborhood and deposited it in front of one's house is a little disheartening. This was the scene that greeted me when I got home from work the other day. I had no choice but to leave my car parked in the road, get out into the biting cold and trudge through the beautifully wind-sculpted Arctic snowdrifts that impeded the path to my garage. I then pressed the automatic opener that must have been designed for use only in Florida because no matter how many times the red light blinked the garage door would not budge. It clanked and grunted in protest a couple of times but obviously it was no more eager to expose itself to the winter cold than I was. I kicked away the snow from the bottom of the door and saw it was just as I suspected; the door had frozen to the garage floor. I tried to kick the door free and may as well have tried kicking a brick wall. I am told that, in a couple of weeks I should be able to fit my swollen foot back into my boot again. I thumbed the opener a few more times and all of a sudden the door shuddered and groaned and with a mighty tearing sound began to pull away from the floor. The tearing sound was most of the paint and about half the wood that used to be on the bottom of the door - but at least it opened up. The first thing I did was grab for my snow shovel that was leaning on the wall in the corner of the garage only to have the shovel grab back. Like the garage door it had become completely frozen to its surroundings and would not move. I gave it a series of increasingly hard yanks and eventually it broke loose. Then I had something else to worry about. My nose. I put down the bloodied shovel, stuffed some snow into my handkerchief to make an ice pack and held it to my nose to stop the blood that was now spouting everywhere. After several minutes I was able to stop the flow but by then there was so much blood on the snow it looked like I had shot and skinned a deer in my driveway. With my bashed in nose throbbing painfully in the cold I began digging out a small track so I could roll my snow blower out of the garage. Retrieving it from its well-protected winter hideaway I realized that what had once been an impressive, shiny new red machine was now very old and battered - after only one winter. After trying to start it a few hundred times I realized it was as tired as it looked. Finally it coughed reluctantly into life but what had once been a loud and healthy roar was now an emphysemic wheeze. I then aimed the machine down my driveway, at which point it started to act like it didn't want to be a snow blower anymore but would rather be a lawn mower because as soon as it struck the heaviest part of the drift it stopped cutting and started climbing. I could see the wisdom in its choice but it wasn't going to help me get my car off the street and into the garage or get my wife's car out in the morning. I pulled the snow blower back and tried to ease it gently back into the drift to see if it could get its confidence back. Again it decided that climbing this mountain of snow was a lot easier than trying to dig through it. Again and again I pulled and pushed the machine in and out of the snowdrift, trying to cut some kind of a path and again and again it refused to do the job it was designed to do. Then, it just gave up and stalled out. In disgust I kicked it, using the same foot I used to kick the garage door. My neighbors told me later that I exclaimed something they had not heard from me in the past and which they would prefer not to hear from me in the future either. I gave up on my soon to be dismantled snow blowing machine, whose future is to become one of many different types of Christmas ornament, grabbed my shovel and went back out into the wilderness of my driveway. I soon found out that a frozen snowdrift is much heavier to move than any snow that falls from the sky. I suspect it absorbs all the salts and sands left behind by our highway department to double its weight while retaining its glaring white appearance. It must also be said that the wind is not the friend of the person trying to move the drift that the wind put there in the first place. I could only assume the wind was proud of its frozen sculpture and did not want anyone trying to undo what it had done. Every time I threw a shovel full of snow to the side of the driveway a gust of wind would catch it and throw it right back at me. I noticed that the wind didn't put it back in the driveway. It pelted my throbbing nose that was rapidly becoming the largest part of my face, got inside my jacket and some of it even got trapped in my underpants. What I wasn't able to figure out was how the snow could get all the way inside my underpants without melting. The competition between myself and the winds of February continued for the next two hours. Sometimes it seemed that for every shovel full of snow I threw to the side the wind threw two more in my face. But, eventually I won. Eventually I cleared out enough of my driveway that I could drive my truck into the garage. As I got out of the truck it was obvious that the winds would have the last word. I stood in the garage door and watched in amazement as the wind picked up and, in a series of powerful gusts, quickly erased my newly cut path and began building a nice new drift for me to move in the morning when I got up. I limped up the garage stairs into the house, holding a blood sodden handkerchief to a nose and was convinced I would need plastic surgery if it was ever to be the same again, my wife greeted me with a look of concern. "Why are you so late?" she asked. So, are you sick of winter yet? The End
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