The Late Arrival

There's nothing special about our neighborhood. No quaint cul de sacs. Just streets that run north to south, sandwiched in between two busy avenues. It's a throwback place -- a hub of post-WWII homes and tree-lined streets whose limbs form a sort of cathedral ceiling. It's a silent night neighborhood . After dark, outside of a few who power-walk dogs begging them to go potty or poop and the occasional car slowly driving north or south, everyone's inside at nighttime. At midnight, Jamie and I were driving that occasional car, returning from a date night while Georgia was at a sleepover. The sky was clear, snowflakes sprinkled past the streetlamps and the streets and sidewalks were empty. Modern Love came on the radio as we began making the slight ascent to our block. We sang along and I knew we'd have to abandon it and our singing by the time we parked. We reached a stop sign at the top of the hill, and Jamie checked for any occasional westbound or eastbo...

The ice ruts in our narrow alley are at least a foot deep. I fought-drove through these uneven passages, trying to strike a balance between keeping the tires aligned within them but not so aligned that the car gets stuck in one. The vehicle and I successfully made it to our destination. The next step was gingerly angling the car across the ruts and backing it into a one-car garage that already bulges with Jamie's many "treasures" without breaking a side mirror. Somewhere in between the first or fourth attempt, I thought about how crazy it is that 22 ° feels balmy in comparison to the minus 22° it was two days ago. And that's when I checked out and drifted back to the day when... ...the air was a thick hot blanket that wrapped itself around each limb, making clothes cling and hair fall limp – or in my case, kink up even more. Smoky pregnant clouds above seemed close enough to touch. They promised rain but refused to deliver, as if intimidated by the sunshine...

A comedian once said that meteorologists have the only job where you can be: evasive: There's probably maybe kind of sort of about a 50% chance of rain ambiguous: We'll have 2 to 12 inches of snow... and wrong: Looks like the storm we've been anticipating just missed us... and still keep your job. I should've been a meteorologist. But this isn't a time for ruing over unfulfilled wishes. The weather guys and girls are predicting a Mini Ice Age. Shouldn't come as a shock. I grew up here, it's just winter in the Midwest. But despite that, I still had my undies in a bundle with the incessant cold-weather-warning harping. In fact, I got depressed. Starting wishing we had deeper pockets so we could flee to someplace warm; and then seriously considered going into debt so we could do it. Finally, I decided that neither wishing nor being buried under a stack of bills were viable options, so I did the next best thing: perused warm-weathe...

It’s been raining here for about three hundred years. I’ve turned these days that aren’t even colorful enough to be considered gray upside down and tried looking at them from a grateful perspective. You know... sunny thoughts like “This is God’s way of getting us to appreciate little things like sunlight” or “You can’t have rainbows without the rain” or “April showers bring May flowers.” That worked for about two days. Turning on the nightly news didn’t help either. I can’t exactly remember what the "Up Next" teaser was. It might’ve been something about someone killing someone else and how they did it; or maybe it was about what war might break out next, or it could’ve been about a senior citizen getting scammed, but then again maybe it was just something about politicians being at each other’s throats in between filibusters. I frantically switched the channel in search of something lighter…like the Weather Channel . The weather guy, who was donning a stove pipe hat,...

What did he say he wanted to do on Saturday again? Jamie's list of to-do's scrolled through my mind as I drove to work: a trip to the store here, an errand there, another errand across town, maybe sledding, maybe work on the basement redo. Next thing I know, it'll be Sunday which means church, errands after church, maybe a nap. Then dinner. Then Monday. Again. My rant was interrupted by the slippery road indicator light blinking at me as my tires spun a through a four-inch snow "drift." Overtired, I giggled at the thought of a four-inch snow drift and remembered the time I got caught in a real blizzard. In 1996, I was a faithful bus rider (faithful because I had no car, but that's another story). From our bachelorette apartment, it took a forty-five minute ride east on the Route 57 downtown, then another twenty-minute stretch northward on the Route 30 to my job at St. Mary's Hospital. At the end of the day, the rides were reversed. This particul...

Did I mention that today's the coldest day of the year?  So cold that even  Charley wouldn't leave home without the sweater Grandma made just for him.