Winter

I can see where this would make a person suicidal. For the last few weeks, I’ve felt I must have shirked my duties this winter. Judging by the driveways, the house, the road, winter has been winning. We’ve spent the last two weekends trying to dig out the storm drain; what few drains are block has are connected by pipe apparently underwhelming in diameter, so having a drain just past the driveway feels like a responsibility. Instead, it currently sits under a mound of snow and what has to be three inches of solid ice. The whole thing seemed irresponsible: what had happened in a year that I went from being able to keep everything snow-free to being nearly buried? It wasn’t a lack of shoveling. The skin on my hands is my skin from 40 years from now. It would take the most romantic of poets to call it rough hewn. It’s cracked, brittle, old. Did the effort drop to old man quality as well?

No. Nothing happened to me. Last year we had two feet of snow at this point. Now we have nine. My favorite Ask Metafilter comment of the season, non-crazy division, was this:

“if it’s still below freezing, tie a thread to the end of the icicle and anchor directly below so the drips travel down the line, and it’ll quickly form a solid column of ice from your eaves to the ground.”

Do they need encouraging? Around here they do that on their own, except, requiring three to four inches of diameter to make the twenty foot trip from eave to ground, gravity comes calling around ten feet and sends the icicle to the ground a bit more quickly than anticipated. Screw you, winter. You can kill me when I’m older.