Snowed Under

You folks in the Midwest  are hunkering down right now for the Big One—a storm that will drop maybe two feet of snow on you.  Cry me a river.  Here in Massachusetts we’ve received four feet of snow in the past month and that is just 2.5 inches short of the all-time record of 50.9 inches in January 2005.

And now they’re predicting 15 inches or more in the next three days. We’ll be watching those dirty frozen mountains in the parking lots melting far past Easter.

So here are some photos I want to share with you.

Up on top is our street sign—Nelson St—where it connects at our corner with Route 140.  (We’re just on the Grafton side of the Shrewsbury line.)  As on every other street in Massachusetts, you have to creep fearfully forward in your car onto the highway because you can’t see around the drifts if a monster truck is hurtling toward you.

This is how our swimming pool looks.  There’s a tiny fish pond at the far end of it.  I wonder if the fish are surviving in there under all that snow.

This is the picket fence that divides our front yard from the lower back  field where the pool is located.

I would like to offer the icicle coming off our roof (below)  to the Guinness Book of Records as the largest icicle in the world.  It reached the ground long ago, and, as you can see, it incorporates several phone lines and such. Has anybody out there got a bigger icicle than this one?

I keep waiting for it to fall and take out our electricity but so far we still have lights—and the Christmas lights on the front-door wreath and the lighted family of geese on the front lawn are still lighted because no one can get to the outdoor electric plug, so the geese are burning brightly under the snow.  Today I saw a spot of green emerge that is the mother goose’s hat.

Here is my car as it looked when I started cleaning it after the last storm.  The young man with the snow blower is from the father-son team who come around and plow our driveways. (Upper and lower driveways.) They’re making a whole lot of money this year and whenever there’s a snow holiday, the teenage son goes skiing.  He really likes snow.  During the last storm, his father’s truck and plow got stuck while clearing our driveway and they spent nearly an hour getting it unstuck.

I grew up in Minnesota and tend to scorn the complaints of  Massachusetts natives with the comment, “You Yankees  don’t know what a snowstorm is.  Back in Minnesota we sometimes had to get out of our house through the second floor window.”

But I sure can’t remember an icicle back in Minnesota to compare with this one.