The thing is, although the weekend we moved into this house was undeniably memorable for its blizzardiness, I suppose in retrospect there was a lot going on with the move itself which may have made my recollections a bit befuzzed. What I recalled going into this weekend was that the snowplows in our new town were supremely on-the-spot, which made me feel good about the new ‘hood. Thus, on Friday, I expected the weekend would unfold something like this: snow beginning on Friday, ending on Saturday afternoon, snowplows making the rounds Saturday night, requisite shoveling on Sunday morning, Super Bowl party on Sunday night. Totally workable.
The first half of the plan went about as expected. (Except for a moment of minor panic Saturday morning when we went downstairs and found a mass of bloody stomach contents on the living room floor. We were mentally and physically prepared to be snowed in all day Saturday, but had no idea what we would do if one of our beloved pets was in need of immediate medical attention. But then it turned out the mass was just the remains of a mouse that one or more of them had hunted down and one or more of them, not necessarily the same one, had tried to eat whole. So, no medical emergency, huzzah! Also, one less mouse in the house, huzzah again! Also, gross on many levels, sorry.)
Then Saturday evening deepened into night and the plows did not come. Sunday morning came and we shoveled out the driveway (with help from our little guy, who dragged around the miniature fireplace shovel and felt like a Very Important Part of the Team) but the plows were nowhere to be seen … on our street, at least. We got reports of other streets in town getting plowed, and could even hear the trucks going by on the nearest major road, but we remained trapped on the wrong side of a might-as-well-be endless stretch of two feet deep white. The Super Bowl party we were supposed to go to was canceled because their neighborhood was just as big a mess, so at least we weren’t missing much.
But we were starting to run a little low on groceries, because I had fully expected to be able to restock by Sunday. The sensation was steadily building of being marooned on an island, watching the skies for a rescue plane (sub “road” for “skies” and “snowplow” for “plane”) and trying not to freak out. Also, add into the mix of seventeen-month-old who doesn’t know how to try not to freak out, and who usually gets at least one car trip every day, because he loves cars and his parents love him and his parents also love not being driven insane by a stir crazy toddler.
My wife ended up walking a few blocks to a local restaurant to pick up some dinner for us Sunday night, and at that point, it was still a tiny bit funny. Jokes were made about how unwieldy it would be to carry extra-large pizzas through the snow, so we settled for a calzone and a sub and some chicken wings, all of which fit in shopping bags. Fortunately, through all of the wintry siege, we never lost power, so we stayed warm, never felt compelled to drink gallons of milk at a go before it spoiled, and knew we’d be able to watch the big game. (Go Saints, btw.) Food supplies were the main concern.
Somewhere along the line we learned a couple of things. Our city maintains that all roads will be plowed 36 to 48 hours after the snowfall stops. So the plows wouldn’t technically be late until about 3 p.m. Monday. And since we live on a short cul-de-sac, not a high traffic thoroughfare, we are on the absolute lowest priority tier for the plows. Maybe the plows didn’t come around as fast as I remembered moving weekend, or maybe that was a fluke. By this morning, we were trying to figure out what our hunting and/or gathering options realistically were. (I was home because the fed closed all the agencies.)
We watched through our front windows as several of our neighbors with big pickup trucks tried to blast their way through the snow, with moderate eventual success. My wife knew from her dinner-pickup excursion the night before that if we could get down our street, the crossing street and most roads after that were clear enough to drive, so we decided to shovel our way from the end of the driveway to the tire tracks our neighbors had made. And then one of our neighbors saved us a lot of work by driving his truck back and forth from the middle of the cul-de-sac to our driveway. We were grateful, but honestly the guy was having so much fun doing it I didn’t feel too terribly indebted. More power to him. In any case, we were just about ready to brave the treacherous street when, right on schedule around 3 p.m., the plows finally came around. And about an hour later, we had a properly restocked kitchen, the local grocery store’s picked-over-ness notwithstanding.
Hopefully enough foodstuffs were obtained this time, because as I said, it’s supposed to snow again tomorrow night, ten-plus inches on top of what we’ve already got. I feel like I’ve spent more days maneuvering my car around a massive snowpile at the end of my driveway than not the entire time we’ve lived at this address. When the spring thaw comes it will be like a whole different neighborhood.
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