Midnight Musings: Days of snow, days of ice

Looking out the window on this February morning, the snow is lightly falling, kissing the windshield of my car. Red-throated woodpeckers, blue jays and a family of cardinals peck at fresh birdseed on our railing. It’s all so picture-perfect; it should warm me to the tips of my toes, despite the cold.

I hate snow.

This winter, and last winter too, our continual snowstorms were less of a kiss and more of a big giant squeezy hug. The kind of hug that takes your breath away and leaves you gasping.

I grew up in Buffalo, so snow lost its mystique around third grade. February was just another long month in a field of snow that would begin in November. Sometimes earlier. I remember snow flurries on Halloween.

Every morning I’d pull on my stocking cap and mittens that never quite dried on our big white radiators.

Followed by my jacket and rubber snow boots — shoe boots we used to call them, inexplicably because you didn’t wear shoes under them. I kept my boots in my stinky cubby at school, surrounded by everyone else’s smelly boots.

My shoe boots were heavy rubber things with matted-down fake fur linings. This was long before UGGS and cozy sheepskin. I’d slip my feet into those rigid boots first thing in the morning, still cold and damp from the day before, and tromp off to school. Nothing good was going to come from a day that started like that.

This year, I’ve worn my L.L. Bean snow sneakers for too many days in a row. Even though they’re warmer and far more high tech, with their PrimaLoft lining and TEK 2.5 waterproofing, still my feet give out a cry of dismay when I pull them on every morning.

Some people must love the snow and look forward to this weather with happy anticipation. Sledding at Goat Hill, cross-country skiing at Mashomack, ice skating at Lily Pond, a hot buttered rum in front of a roaring fire. Maybe too, the guys who made $1,400 a day plowing snow during our last storm.

Or snow event, as it’s called now. We don’t have storms, we have events and these events have names. Thanks to the Weather Channel and weather apps on our phones, we know weeks in advance how much and when, almost to the minute.

Of course, it’s better to be prepared. But it takes the mystery out of the weather.

The night before a storm, the school’s Connect Ed telephone system rings the home and cell phones of students and their families, alerting them of closings and delays. Now really, where is the fun in that? Gone are the days when you woke up at 6 a.m. and flipped on the radio, shivering in your jammies as you listened to the monotone voice of the DJ rattle off every preschool, every high school, every senior center that was closed, as you held your breath, waiting to hear if your school made the list.

And the jubilation when it did! Well, all except during the Blizzard of ’77 when we missed something like six days of school and I would’ve sold my soul to be back at school, instead of stuck in the house with my eight brothers and sisters, all of us suffering from virulent cabin fever since day two.

The silver lining of this last storm was it gave me a real adult snow day at a time when I most needed it. I’d been fighting a cold for weeks and having that one unexpected free day in the middle of the week was truly a gift. I slept late, finished my book, started knitting a hat and watched the snow pile up from my recliner — the best place to ride out a storm.

My husband had the exact opposite day. Dressed in about 50 layers of clothes, he headed out into the snowy darkness at 5 a.m. I woke up and looked out our front window. He was shoveling his truck out in the light of his headlights so he could work on the 6 a.m. ferry and shovel some more snow off the ferry deck.

Our cats weren’t happy either, especially the half-feral one, who always has her eye on the open door. She stared at the 5-foot snow drift against our patio door with something like disbelief and horror, not understanding why she couldn’t get out. Icicles, sharp as daggers, hung from the eaves, threatening to behead her if she ventured outside.

The following Monday, we had every kind of weather in one day — except sun. The day started with lots of rain, turned to freezing rain and then snow. The temperature dropped about 70 degrees overnight.

We woke up the next morning to a world encased in ice. Every tree, bush and power line had a thin layer of ice that caught the morning sun. The trees wore a blush of pinkish ice. It was gorgeous. And treacherous.

As the sun set and backlit all the trees, they shone as if covered with millions of tiny white Christmas lights. I tried to capture it with my camera, as did my photographer friends, but no one managed to show how beautiful it was in real life.

We used to live in Florida and I imagine all of the conversations that occur in RVs or “tinominiums” and at Publix, Home Depot and Cracker Barrel. All those transplanted Northerners and snowbirds. I can hear them from here, chuckling. “Well, at least I’m not in (fill in the blank with  New York, Boston, Michigan or Ohio). I’ve shoveled enough snow for my lifetime.”

Then there’s my cousin, retired from teaching and escaping Binghamton for winter in the Florida Keys, who posts photo after photo of himself, sitting on the sun-filled deck of a restaurant overlooking a marina, drinking a beer. And gloating. Sometimes social media just isn’t a good thing.

Surprisingly, upstate New York has been spared this last bout of snow fatigue. My mother called from Buffalo, startled at their lack of snow this winter — not counting the 5 feet of lake effect snow that fell in the south towns near them and seemed to stop just before their driveway. But there’s always that chance of snow looming. One year when I called her for Mother’s Day, I was admiring the spectacular cherry blossom tree in full bloom overlooking our deck, and she glanced outside her window and noticed snow flurries.

Back on the Island, my city friend who lives across the street and hasn’t been to the Island since the last storm, asked how her driveway looked and wondered if she’ll need her cross country skis to get to her back door. The snow is no longer something soft and moveable. It’s snow concrete and snow boulders now.

My husband has shoveled and chipped ice and shoveled again and still our driveway is a minefield of icy potholes. When he apologized to UPS Bobby for the rough terrain, Bobby  replied, “God put it here, it’s up to God to get rid of it.”

I wonder how much he’ll charge.