We were again woken up at 4 am by street noise, but there wasn’t a coked-up deliveryman doing his best Sonja Henie in a balaclava this time around: the disturbance was caused by a plow that a neighbor apparently hired to clear her driveway. Four hours later, tired and exasperated, we were at the grocery store, where I was tearfully reunited with Buncha Crunch in an almost barren candy aisle. Had people salted their driveways with Haribo? Burned Snickers bars in the fireplace to keep their families warm? I prefer to think we’ve all wised up to the fact that a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup hoard is more helpful in trying times than a gross of eggs.
Once it warmed up later in the morning — and once I’d edited last night’s post, which needed more synonyms for ‘car’ — I put on headphones and queued up a library audiobook about Elon Musk’s stupidity, then got to work outside.* There was a lot I wanted to finish before tonight’s refreeze, including clearing a better path from the back door to the driveway, breaking up a few remaining ice chunks near my side of the garage, and removing the latest mounds of dirty plow slush from the bottom of the driveway to minimize workweek headaches for Crankenstein.
She pitched in briefly but otherwise spent her day napping and catching up on work notes while Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (an old childhood favorite of hers currently streaming on Amazon Prime) played in the background. As I neared the end of my street cleanup, Fence Waterer returned from Aldi and picked up his shovel; his fiancée’s car, which he’d left on the street after his late-night misadventure, was now plowed-in. He’d only been at it for a half-hour or so before laughing and calling out “I’m already beat.” It was the first time I’d seen him smile.
Remembering how overwhelming our first big snow in this current house had been, I decided to clear the area in front of her car while he dealt with the back. He said he’d been parking at a restaurant around the corner and walking home each day because their driveway was so icy that his fiancée’s car couldn’t pull up far enough for his vehicle to fit behind it. That explained why he’d parked on the street on Friday night, a decision that created more work for us both.
In a bid to prevent it from happening again, I said he was welcome to try our snow blower next time, adding that it makes quick work of most snow but wasn’t much of a match for last weekend’s ice. He asked if we’d had any avalanches; his spooked fiancée had called him when he was shopping to say they’d just had three. “Yep,” I replied. “It happens to all of us with slate roofs. If you’re inside at the time, you’ll hear the rumble and it’ll rattle the house. You’ll get used to it eventually.”
“That was what freaked her out!” he exclaimed. “It shook the house.” His relieved expression reminded me of the excruciating anxiety of first-time homeownership, a memorable stage of life that was equally special and stressful. Once the car was unearthed, I went inside to crack open a Cherry Coke and take my next dose of levodopa. Muriel followed expectantly; she’d been patient the whole time I was gone and now she wanted to frolic outside. Sliding back into my snowy slip-on Storm Chasers and gloves, I sang her Gordon’s version of Sesame Street’s “The People in Your Neighborhood,” changing a lyric or two to make it about winter weather. She took nothing from it; seconds later she angrily barked at another neighbor’s dog.
* That’s an oversimplification: I strongly dislike Musk and wouldn’t read a book solely about him; Character Limit is about the destruction of Twitter. From classics like Barbarians at the Gate and When Genius Failed to newer books about Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker and the predictable collapses of Theranos and WeWork, I love few genres more than ‘epic business fails.’