Of Earth and Stars

Living just outside of Raleigh, we spent the majority of yesterday waiting out in the dreaded "dry slot", a term that makes my teeth itch, but is o.k.a. the Raleigh Dome of Doom - an area of dry air stuck between two steady pressure systems (a frequent influence of our mountains-to-sea geography) that quickly ate any snow in the upper atmosphere. After a brief flirt with fat flakes early in the morning, things dropped into a lull until around 5:30 in the afternoon, when the dome finally subcumbed to the Wintercane forces and snow and wind began to fall in earnest. It continued that way for about 10 hours, leaving us with 4-5" of the actual real, honest-to-goodness fluffy powdery joy that the rest of the world experiences (we usually are stuck schlepping around tiny mounds of soggy wet snow and kicking ice bricks). To our east and west, the totals ran several inches higher.

On waking I took a few obligatory pictures of the yard looking perfect - all the leaf litter and pine straw that makes up most of our lot was quietly subdued, and for a moment, our grass-loving wish-they-were-in-an-HOA neighbors forgot we are trying to keep things native and natural and forgave us. We tried to walk the dog (she isn't having it), and I spent a portion of the afternoon repurposing the leaf-blower as a makeshift snow clearance tool. This was only moderately successful, because despite my living up and down the east coast as a child, I do remain somewhat Southern and clueless when it comes to cold guests that arrive in large groups overnight and overstay their welcome. "Let me let you be gettin' on then" does not work in this case. So I tried to review the best means to move snow from a hilly gravel drive that is heavily shaded by trees - a gravel drive I had regraded and refreshed last summer after several summers and winters of rogue heavy storms had cut a new tributary through it. A new drive that I have hawkishly inspected after every rain since and tended to lovingly with a rake to make sure the ideal rock distribution remains to protect further erosion of the soil and our bank account.

I regret and/or may be proud to say (results pending) that I only managed to clear the top layers of snow, leaving a thin layer over the rocks that I then drug a rake over backwards (to avoid picking up rocks), creating either some minimal traction or a completely useless and innavigable work of natural art. Since there remains Unhealthy Levels of Canada™ in the region, there was no real melting today, but tomorrow is a different day. I have a rogue memory of our first snow here when the boys, still teens, compacted everything to ice in their cars and created a giant slip-in-slide to the ditch that, due to the shade, lasted a few weeks. But I am holding out hope that I have removed enough snow that any melting tomorrow will leave things in better shape. If not, may kitty litter and charcoal and our endless supply of fallen tree limbs help us all.

Of course this effort called for a celebration of hot chocolate - this is the first day post-surgery that I am allowed hot food and drinks, so a celebration was going to happen, yard work or not. I made the mistake of looking over at my neighbor's driveway (he's from Pittsburgh, and the Steelers' flag is up year round). It seems he managed to use his leafblower to turn his gravel path into an immaculate collection of rocks, not a trace of ice between them, which he emphasized by carefully backing all three of his (also immaculate) vehicles up in reverse. I assume he is using chemistry and/or dark magic. I would have offered him a hot cocoa, but I was feeling a little salty at my own deficits (why, yes, we are out of Ice Melt and salt).

After these adventures I spent some time sketching, until my eyes couldn't take it anymore. I chose the smartest subject in the home, who other than heroically pooping on the side of the house in the one untouched dry spot by the trash and recycling bins, spent the rest her day hiding under a blanket. ( rough sketch of Yoshi under her blanket )