Snowblind

Today is an important day, because it marks two very important anniversaries.  The first is my wife Amy’s birthday.  I won’t tell you how old she is because you never tell a woman’s age, but I’ll give you a hint:  she’s older than the Duchess of Kent (who is also a beautiful, refined, intelligent woman), but younger than Sam Donaldson (who also dyes his hair).  Happy Birthday, Amy.

The other anniversary is one I’ve begun celebrating recently, and that’s the anniversary of the snow completely melting from our yard.  It’s been two weeks.  Two wonderful weeks without snow in our yard.  It’s mid-May, right?  And we just got rid of that damn snow.

I should be used to snow by now.  Growing up in Western New York, we got nothing but “lake effect” snow.  When I was younger, the drifts would pile up well over your head, and we’d put on our “snowmobile suits” and play in the snow, and make snow forts, and go sledding, and all was right with the world.  Then I got older, and I moved away from Western New York, and climate change kicked in.  I never thought I’d see that kind of snow again.  But then we moved to Maine.

Shortly after we moved in January of 2015, the snow started falling, and it didn’t stop.  We had record snowfalls in New England, and we were pounded by snowstorms (as the kids say) “on the regular.”  It was brutal, just like the lake effect snow I grew up with.

We bought our house that March, and when we moved in, there was one huge pile of snow behind the garage that reached nearly as high as the garage roof.  It was so tall, I called it “The Matterhorn.”  The Matterhorn was the only pile of its height, and its size and location were inexplicable to me.  It was behind the garage, and it was massive.  By the end of March, all the snow piled up on the driveway was nearly gone, but the Matterhorn stood proudly in the backyard behind the garage, tall enough that several times I stood on it to clean out the garage gutters that were full of decaying leaves, pine needles, and pine cones.  This sucker was huge.

Eventually April came, and the snow started to thaw fairly quickly.  One day I spied the Matterhorn out of our kitchen window and noticed there was a flat black patch on top.  I went outside to inspect it, and later came in to report my findings to Amy: “Hey, guess what?  We own a grill!”  The handful of times I’d been cleaning out those gutters, I’d been standing on a snow-covered gas grill, complete with a half-full propane tank.

Last year the winter was a much milder one, but then this winter came.  Sure, everything started out all right.  I mean, take a look at this photo – it’s our house at the end of October.  It was beautiful:

Then winter slowly started to roll in, with a few small flurries.  Thanksgiving and even Christmas were pretty mellow weather-wise, with a little bit of snow, but not enough to be concerned about.  The snow was so pathetic at that point, this is how I took care of it:

That’s me with a leaf blower, clearing the flurries off the deck.  I’m lazy, I’ll admit it.  And trust me, I was going to have to save my lower back for more abuse later in the season.  The snow slowly started to pile up a bit, and we did get a few small storms that required plowing the driveway.  This photo is from the beginning of January, when I planted our Christmas tree in the burgeoning snow pile on the driveway.  It was like my version of Yuletide Iwo Jima:

I got ready for the approaching snow holocaust by staking out reflective markers on the driveway so the plow guy would know where the driveway ended and the grass started.  We had already pulled in all the patio furniture.  And I had wrapped the grill in plastic and shoved it into a protected corner of the deck.  Everything was gonna be just fine.

But it wasn’t just fine.

Just like the winter of 2015, at the end of January, the proverbial sh*t hit the proverbial fan.  It started snowing hard, and it didn’t stop.  At one point it snowed 7 times in 9 days!  Our plow guy came more than the mailman.  Three parking spots in the driveway slowly became two.  And after a while, those driveway markers I’d staked out were completely gone, all covered in snow.

That’s when the problems began.  Problems like, “I’ve gotta shovel the deck again,” and problems like, “There’s two feet of snow on our roof,” and problems like, “I only own a shovel, so how am I going to clear two feet of snow off our roof?”  This snow was getting ridiculous.  It was piling up everywhere.  Around this time I made a major decision:  I had to buy a goddamn roof rake.

For those who don’t know (you lucky, blissfully ignorant bastards), a roof rake is a big scraper on a long extendable pole that you use to pull the snow off your roof.  If you’ve got too much snow on your roof (as is prone to happen in New England), your roof is susceptible to collapse, and I was not excited about the prospect of building a snow fort in my living room.  First, I no longer own a “snowmobile suit,” and second, I really like having a roof on my house.

Before I bought the roof rake, I would actually take out a ladder and shovel, and climb on to the roof.  Don’t tell Amy (oh well, too late), but I was up there shoveling layers of snow off the roof in a pair of LL Bean boots.  And it got slippery at times.  I’d find myself skating around on the icy shingles, and sliding towards the edge, saying “Whoa. Whoa. WhoooOAAAAA…” And then I would just about stop at the gutter, thinking about the best way to fall down into the snow, and how to crawl in to the house to call 911 with a broken collar bone.

That’s why I got a roof rake.  And in using the roof rake, I solved an earlier mystery that became abundantly clear – the mystery of the Matterhorn.  I now know why the Matterhorn was in the backyard: it’s a simple case of geometry.  I’ll explain.  I love our deck in the summer, but in the winter, it’s my sworn enemy. Take a look at this stupid deck:

Our deck is in a triangle between the house, the garage, and our bedroom extension, with one end leading to the front yard and the other open to the backyard.  So imagine it:  the snow piles up on the deck.  Then you use the roof rake, and all the snow from the roof piles on the deck as well.  Now you’ve got two feet of snow on the deck that has to go somewhere if you intend on getting out of the house and going to the garage, where the car, the garbage, the beer fridge, and the paper towels live (my wife uses more paper towels than any other human being I know – I could do a whole blog post about it, but nevertheless, I digress…).  You’ve got to move that snow off the deck.

You could move it towards the front of the house, but because it has nowhere to go except through that funnel up front, it would require moving the snow twice – one time heaving the snow towards the gap, and a second time heaving the snow through the gap and on to the front lawn.

The other option is moving it into the backyard behind the garage, where all the snow coming off the back of the garage roof meets all the snow coming off the bedroom roof.  So when the snow on the rear half of the deck gets heaved behind the garage, it goes on to an already huge pile of snow created from roof-raking the garage and the bedroom.  And thus, a massive pile of snow called the Matterhorn takes shape in the back

And speaking of backs, let’s talk about my back.  After moving all this snow, my back would be killing me.  Like a throbbing pain.  And my hands would be freezing, and there would inevitably be an inch of snow in my boots.  And that’s not all – it gets better.  The deck is pretty old, and a little beat up, so every time I would shovel it, the front edge blade of the shovel would catch on the heads of the nails holding the deck together.  Like every two feet.  I would literally destroy the deck by pulling nails out a millimeter at a time.  So I would come into the house swearing and muttering and complaining like an old man standing behind someone who has 16 items in the 15 or less checkout.

But then there were those idyllic moments of beauty.  There would be calm winter afternoons when the snowflakes started to fall, and those big, white flaky wonders of nature, each one unique and its own miracle, would float out of the sky and land gently on swaying pine boughs, and Amy would say “oh, I love it when it snows, it’s so beautiful.”  She would smile softly, and sit in her comfy chair by the window, clutching a warm cup of coffee, and I would lovingly reply, “I hate that shit.”  I began to hate it every time it snowed.  My sore back, moving piles of snow twice, the misery of the cold – just looking at the stuff would send me into a tirade.

And get this.  In March, we decided to leave the snow behind and take a vacation.  Enough with the drifts and the piles and the shoveling.  And where did we go?  We left the frozen tundra of Maine and went to…Iceland.

So yeah.  That’s pretty much how my life goes.  I guess the name of the country wasn’t enough of a clue for me.

Allow me a brief aside, if you will.  My father grew up in Western New York, and lived his whole life there, other than four years in college in Michigan.  This man knows snow.  I wouldn’t say he’s some kind of Eskimo, with a different name for every different kind of snow, but trust me, the guy knows snow.  He’s seen record-breaking blizzards, drifts as high as houses, and ice-storms that knocked out power for days.  He owned a snowblower the size of a Volkswagen with massive chains on the tires.  He had hats and gloves and mittens and snow gear that Admiral Parry could have taken to the North Pole.  And he wore galoshes.  That’s right… galoshes!  Yet shortly after he retired, he and my mother bee-lined it for Florida.  And this winter it finally came to me why – he moved to Florida because snow sucks.  Everyone loves seeing the snow, and playing in the snow, and watching Jim Cantore fart around in the snow at some Massachusetts strip mall, but Dads brave the elements to move the snow – not the kids, or stupid Jim Cantore.  So now I get why he wanted to shake the powder off his galoshes and move to the Sunshine State, where he can get to the Cracker Barrel and the Dollar Store unhindered by pain-in-the-ass snow drifts.

When we got to late March and early April, and everything started to thaw, trust me, I was thrilled.  We had a few more days of snow, for sure, including one freak storm that dumped another foot on us, but we were definitely on the backside of things.  The snow piles started to recede, and the yard slowly started to reveal itself.  And this is when I started to make all the discoveries.  For example:

This was a big clear patch of beautiful green grass on the side of the house, in the middle of all the snow.  It seems like a bit of an anomaly, no?  Let me explain.  A few feet below that beautiful clear patch of green grass is a fetid, warm septic tank, filled with some of the most steaming unmentionable effluent from our house.  The ground never froze there.  Not after daily hot showers and Taco Tuesday.  Then there was this:

This is the sad remainder of one of my driveway markers.  I lost four of them this winter, plowed over and made into fiberglass toothpicks.  This was another constant source of irritation for me.  Every time the driveway got plowed, I’d find another marker missing, only to find it weeks later when the snow had receded.  My understanding is that the marker is there to say “don’t plow beyond here” as opposed to “run over me and snap me into pieces like a Stella Dora breadstick.”

What you see above, the little orange thing, is a plastic cap that sits on top of a driveway marker.  The marker was decimated, but the cap survived intact, somewhere in the midst of the snow pile.  But that’s not the interesting part of this photo.  Here’s a closer look:

Do you see what’s to the left of that little plastic orange cap?  That, friends, is a dead salamander.  Which begs many, many questions; most notably, how the hell did a salamander get into this snow pile?  Was he out for a mid-winter constitutional in the driveway when he got caught in a storm and plowed into the pile?  Or did he freeze to death, trapped on a small glacier while out searching for orange plastic caps in the snow?  This mystery replaces the mystery of the Matterhorn.

Most of the snow in the yard soon melted away, leaving only the Matterhorn and the two big plow piles on either side of the driveway.  Then one 70-degree day in April, I took matters into my own hands.  I cheated.

I decided I was getting rid of the snow in the front yard.  First I got out the shovel and slowly cut the pile down a bit, throwing the snow on the hot driveway.  Then, when it was manageable, I took the pile apart piece by piece, and smashed that sonuvabitch on the driveway.

Meanwhile, Amy sat in a beach chair, drank a Rolling Rock, and texted photos to her sisters as I made a total ass out of myself.  But almost all the snow was finally GONE – with one big exception.  I would not touch the Matterhorn.  I decided I would let my nemesis melt away, in a slow and agonizing death not unlike the Wicked Witch of the West.  Slowly over time it got smaller and smaller, until a few weeks ago.

Have you ever seen the Harry Potter movie – I’m not sure which one, frankly – when Voldemort and Harry battle with their lightsabers or whatever, and then Voldemort is reduced to some kind of gross little baby, like a micro-Carrie laying around in some surreal white hyperspace?  I’m not 100% sure what happened, to be honest, even though my wife watches every Harry Potter movie every time there’s a “Harry Potter Weekend” on TV, which is seemingly every other weekend.  But I do know this – Amy and her family refer to this iteration of the character as “Fetal Voldemort.”

Yup, that’s Fetal Voldemort (hey, I didn’t make the movie, don’t blame me – I know it’s gross).  And as the Matterhorn slowly withered away under the sunshine and 50-degree heat, all that was left was a small pathetic patch on the back lawn that Amy and I began to refer to as Fetal Voldemort.  And just like The Wicked Witch of the West, Fetal Voldemort, or Nicolas Cage’s career, it slowly withered away and died entirely a few weeks ago.

It was finally over.  No more plowing.  No more shoveling.  No more Matterhorn, no aching back, no nails on the deck, no shattered driveway markers.  Just a lot of brush on the lawn, a ton of raking to do, mud everywhere, and the greenest, freshest grass growing over the septic tank.  Winter was over.

So that’s why, two weeks later, I’m celebrating:  celebrating the anniversary of the disappearance of winter, the end of my suffering, and the final demise of Fetal Voldemort.  And celebrating Amy’s birthday.  But like Amy’s birthday, the snow will come around next year.  And like Amy’s birthday, it’ll sneak up on me, totally unprepared, but knowing I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the paths clear, to keep the house warm, and to keep her happy while she sits in her comfy chair looking out the window.