Christmas snow is magic. New and clean and cold and powdery, it holds the promise of new beginnings, sleigh rides, and sugar plums (whatever the hell they are). Snow in December is a misty eyed Norman Rockwell joy. It’s beautiful. Plowing snow in December is a kinetic joyride.
March snow is a slog. Plowing snow in March is Kafkaesque. It’s a house guest that clogs the toilet, cleans out the fridge, and won’t leave no matter how much you drop the hint that its welcome has worn thin. It’s a gray oatmeal of misery shat upon a watery base of weak ice and layers of slime. It reeks of tax forms and moldy basements. Shining machinery once proudly tuned for battle in nature’s seasonal maelstrom has been reduced to iced up crevices in the snow blower’s infrastructure and frayed winch cables on the ATV. The woodpile, once stacked like glorious battlements, has been picked down and sags in terminal decline. My proud little tractor lies unused because its backblade can’t shove snow chest high and the wheel cleats would only spin on the packed snow base. In December it was perfect. In March it’s outgunned. Chickens are moulting, attitudes are harsh, and the beer is running low. We have held the line bravely but the siege has been long.
Winter has taken its toll. I am ready for spring.
Let me be this first to add to your misery, sir. The apostrophe in that next-to-the-last line is incorrect. Always glad to help. 🙂 Hang in there, we’re not that far apart geographically, and we’re getting rain and freezing rain instead of snow. Tolerate the season, my good man- we have no choice.
Aaack!
Consider me chastised.
“It reeks of tax forms” is arguably the finest line of prose ever written.
Thanks. I was particularly proud of that.
I’m kind of the other way ’round on it. When I was younger and enjoyed sledding, making snowmen and snow angels, that sort of thing, the snows were just as you described. Now that I’m older, December snows are the start of a long, hard slog though the season. I push snow as far as I can, knowing I can only push the next batch as far as I push this one. I blade the driveway over forty feet wide, that light fluffy snow of December is easy to move. But that north wind will fill it in, next snowfall I’ll be down to thirty-five feet. Already I feel claustrophobic, mother nature is hemming me in.
By February, if the tractors are still working, I see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. Comes March and I could give a damn. Two or three inches of snow? Bah! Probably melt before I need to take the snowplow blade off the Ferguson and move it with the loader (1), I can just shove it aside a little and call it good.
(1) I’ve used a Ferguson TE-20 for snow tasks for nearly 30 years now. I’ve a loader on it that’s part fabrication and part kit, along with a snowplow blade on the front. On the back I hang about 900 lbs of landscape blade, just for the weight, and of course chains on the tires. It works well, but a heavy wet snow will find it out of traction, weight, and then power in that order. It’ll do just about anything, but with only 20hp and under 2 tons it won’t do it fast. The loader bucket is only 3′ wide, when I can no longer push I have to move it one chunk at a time. I also have an International 560 with loader and an 8′ Farm King blower on it. You know, for big stuff. But I’m too cheap to fire that up when the little Fergie will do the job.
I certainly understand being sick of snow and cold, but I get tired of heat a lot faster. In winter, I can always put on another sweater. Come summer, there’s only so much I can take off before somebody calls the cops.
Which brings up something that has bugged me for a long time; why isn’t the birthday of the man who invented air conditioning a National holiday?
March snow is a pain! In Colorado it comes in heavy, wet, and melts too fast, caking the truck in a hard shell of snow melt and whatever secret sauce it is that the DOT throws on the roads. The same stuff they glue on shuttle tiles with I suspect. Coincidentally, windshield wiper sales are at their peak.