Late evening Wednesday, 2 January 2002, the snow started to fall.
A day later, I could have sworn that I had only dreamed about taking
that flight back from Minnesota on the 1st. 9-12 inches of snow
(not as much as the 25 or so inches we got two years ago) blanketed
everything. On the morning of the 4th, I ventured out for a walk on
the snow and ice, and took my camera with me.
One of the first things that I saw was a 4WD vehicle which had
somehow (I still don't quite understand how -- showing off comes
to mind, but there probably is some better explanation; I expect
I tend to think of explanations that might apply to me if I were
in the same situtation) parked itself on a neighbor's lawn,
well-positioned to slide into the stop sign only 15 inches or so
away.
Some people apparently made better use of their time than to try to
drive around on steep, unplowed hills. This family of snowmen
basking in the bright sunlight after the storm was relaxed and
happy.
This road is much steeper than it looks in this picture; it is
probably one of the steepest roads in the neighborhood. Of
course, the whole neighborhood appears to have used it as a
sledding hill, packing about 10 inches of snow down into 2-3
inches of glare ice. I don't envy the folks who live down
that hill -- perhaps in another week or so all that glare ice
will melt. At our last house, on an even steeper hill, when we
had over two feet of snow, the neighbors did the same thing,
and then we spent the following two and a half days chipping
the ice off the road so that we could take our cars down it.
That was after salting the worst bits of it. I used
a garden spade in the process (it was all I had to the purpose)
and I removed an inch of steel from the tip in the process of
removing all that ice.
Then I just walked through a winter wonderland for a while.
This really took me back to my childhood in northern Wisconsin.
As I walked, I found some road that had been plowed ("scraped",
they call it here, probably in an attempt to be accurate about
the fact that they tend to move snow around randomly rather
than do anything seriously planned about it) quite recently.
Looking closely, you can see the plow still in sight!
As I walked, I found that the plow was
getting closer...
Finally, on my way back into my house, this little image caught my
eye, and it seemed like a nice image to leave y'all y'alls with.
(You, too, can learn to speak North Carolinian!)