Thank Yew, Lord!

Those living in sunny climes may have read that we had what some are calling a blizzard over the past weekend. Started snowing early Friday and snowed on through the weekend until late Saturday night. There was wind too, which whipped what was a fine misty snow into dunes and shallows, across the road and across the yards and driveways hereabouts.
     There was a lot of snow, something like six inches to a foot and drifts higher than that, but I'd hardly call it a blizzard.
     A blizzard is heavy snow, big nasty-ass flakes, coming down out of the sky at warp two and wafting across the yards and alleys and trees and whales and snakes and badgers in a 20 knot gale, unending, relentless and mean. Temperatures down to single digits and that's even before the wind-chill gets figured.
     That, that's a blizzard, dammit.
     Anything else is a snow fall or, at worst, a snow storm.
     And to hear it from around here, you'd think we were stuck in our igloos with Nanuk and the kids, chewing on spoiled rodent blubber with only the light of the chicken fat lamp to illumine the darkness of winter.

As if.

So there we were, damn near out of milk and needin' to get to the store for more toilet paper, itchin' to get out of the cabin after a couple hours of snow fallin' like a dusting of crops in Kansas. And we all know how cabin fevered we can get in a Kansas crop dusting. But that's how it was.
     Horrible, death-defying loneliness and isolation.
     Cid comes up the steps to ask me what I wanted to do about dinner.
     It was Friday, after all, and on Fridays it's become the custom for us to go to some restaurant that don't have a drive through and get dinner. Been doin' it for years. Hell, we've been doin' it for decades.
     Just like that.
     I looked at Cindy's haggard expression, the woeful circles under her eyes from hours of tormenting television weather channel watching, and realized that my RoadRunner link up was slower than usual. So slow I'd taken to playing solitaire.
     Horrible, crushing isolation and pain.
     I said "What you wanna do, yo?"
     She said "Well, we could fix something . . . or we could go down the street . . . "
     She was referring to the Tavernet, a small formerly-smoke-filled eatery about half a block down the ice-infested, snow-covered, froze all to hell street.
     Truth up, I was torn between just collapsing into a ball of painfully beaten flesh, right there on the floor in front of the battery back up power supply to my three different ham radio doodads.
     Oh, the humanity.
     But I did not collapse. I thought about what Cid had suggested and said "Hell with it. Let's go to the Tavernet."
     She said "Ok."
     That having been decided, we gathered about us our warmest space suits, ready to go EVA on the house & the weather, to trudge through the minimalist wind and tiny flakes smaller than a mosquito's pudenda, what a horror! Of course it took extra time because I had to find my glasses and my wallet and the keys to the house and put on the helmet and the gloves and check for leaks.
     Then I had to take a leak, it being cold outside and all.
     And then we were off! Facing the gale, marching in locked step through the maybe three or four inches of snow on the sidewalks, down across the crushed and glazed surface of the streets, on we trudged, knowing we would freeze . . . or at least get our feet wet. Then, looking both ways for traffic & knowing better, and finally got to our destination, safe at last.
     Merciful heavens! The raw power of nature at her worst!
     Cindy opened the door and, with great trepidation, stepped inside.
     The place was packed!

Yes! We were safe and again in the company of others! No more were we isolated ourselves into our tiny two story, twelve hundred square feet cabin! No! We were now with other humans, other people just like us, the kind of folks who, when faced with adversity and the punishing torment of nature gone wild, will step out of their cozy homes and venture across some kind of cold stuff with snow & all that to eat together at some place that has cold beer on tap and two restrooms.
     Saved, I tell you! We were saved from a grizzly & horrible boredom!
     And it would only cost us slightly more than it would going to one of those tony places by the mall where they have a wide variety of drinks and food and salads and such. Ok, maybe a bit more, maybe.
     But we were safe from the storm!
     So we ordered and they brought the relish tray thingie over with the sauerkraut and the cottage cheese and pickles & such, and we ate of that. Then they brought our orders – and for me another beer – and we did eat of that.
     Then they brought the check and did eat of my wallet.

But while we were there, during our meal, I heard a strange conversation from a family at another, nearby table. Four people sat there, stuffing food into their chops and one of the women said "They're closing the churches! Can you imagine that?"
     Of course, me being an as-yet non-migratory snow bird, I could imagine that.
     I could imagine a church being so snowed in, by the Ohio definition of snowed in, that the pastor or deacons would decide it might be better to just lock the center of worship up for the weekend. No need to ask people to endanger themselves or others driving through what were pretty bad driving conditions just to gather for a few hours Sunday morning in praise and supplication of their divine.
     It would be potentially costly to those driving in, should they have an accident on the way. And it would be potentially dangerous to others on the road as well, many of whom might be headed to the grocery store to stock up on bread and milk, as we seen to do in Ohio just before it snows bad. Or just before it snows some.
     Makes perfect sense, don't it?
     It's rotten weather; no need to cause problems. Close the church & tell folks to pray in their own homes with family & loved ones.
     But it got me thinking, all the same, these folks getting het up about the churches not bein' open. I could almost see their plight, these cognitively incapacitated hominids and their religious conundrum. Dutifully worshipful they obviously were. Addled, maybe, but obviously dutiful toward their divine's need for attention, even in the middle of a blizzard. Or a serious snow storm.
     Whatever.
     Whatever you want to call it, the weather was bad enough to close the roads and highways and keep the ambulances going back and forth to homes & businesses where someone with a sedentary lifestyle would have a coronary shoveling the snow out of the way for Jesus.
     So I began to imagine the wonderful sermons that people would do donuts on the highway ice and creep across lawns and down into gullies, getting stuck on their way to hear. The preacher's voice in the pulpit. The congregation attentive to every syllable while the snow plows ground on through the early morning, spreading salt and plowing in driveways just cleared by the old guy got took off to the hospital.
     The sermon about the beauty of the winter scenery – 'cause I guess for some it would beautiful, and even to me it might be – and the divine's attention to all the details of esthetics, the contrasts of light, the monochrome nature of the light, the trees frozen, the birds frozen, old drunks in the street frozen, down there on the streets of iniquity which the lord doth so greatly detest, praise be!
     Yes, friends, we now bow our heads and thank yew, Lord God, for this marvelous morning, bright and frozen all to hell and back, and for the accidents that we had getting here, the maimed and broken bodies, the busted up windshields, the towing fees, the insurance premiums and insurance cancellations, oh Father God, praise! For you have chosen to freeze the shit out of all that is and cover it with a blanket of freezing snow which doth test our cardiovascular conditioning in the removal of which, Oh God, we do strive mightily, unless we have a friend with a snow plow!
     Yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! Yes! Yes!
     Don't stop!
     Oh yes! Yes! Yes! Oh! Yes!
     Yes!
     At which point we got to the bottom of filling our guts with food, so much being left over in his grace that we should not have desert but instead ask for boxes. And we did then return to our humble oasis from the storm, walking this time with the wind behind us and a good dinner and a couple beers & a margarita in our bellies, back to the safety of our home, in the name of all that we had consumed, amen.
     
On Sunday morning Cindy and I were out shoveling the snow off the driveway. We had a patch about five foot on a side done when I noticed the guy with the truck in the parking lot of the bank next door. I put my shovel down, Oh Lord, and walked over to where I could see him and he could see me.
     He pulled up and rolled down the window. "Want your driveway cleared?"
     "Yep. How much?"
     "Fifty. All the way up to the garage & out, fix you up."
     "Take a check?"
     "Yep. Here's my card. Make it out to the name on the card."
     "Gotcha. Be right back."
     In something like ten minutes maybe total my driveway was cleared off and I could get my car out of the well of snow that had built up around it. Cid's car was in the garage, brand new and auto 4-wheel drive. By that time, as we'd discovered when we first picked up shovels and headed out, the sun was higher in the sky, the air did warm and soon enough everything was melting along on its own nicely, thanks.