Laughing all the way: There’s no business like snow business
February 5, 2010
By Pat Detmer
By this time last year, we had been battered by multiple snowstorms. That was when The Sainted One and I discovered that we were in decent enough shape to slide to downtown Newcastle from our perch in Olympus, buy a 12-pack of beer, stow it in our backpacks and trudge back up the hill to our house.Desperation is an amazing motivator!
By this time last year, the Good Neighbors to the North and South had helped us shovel the cul-de-sac, so that our family could get to the house to celebrate Christmas Eve. I also used a plastic dustpan to clear our driveway of at least two feet of snow, which is why our Christmas gifts from the GNN and GNS this year were a heavy-duty metal dustpan and a real shovel. Unfortunately, this means that if we ever get buried again, we will be expected to dig them out.
But so far this winter — and I’m writing this the second week of January — there have been no blizzards. There hasn’t even been the threat of a flurry. In fact, I’m not even sure that the “S” word has been used in a sentence by a weatherman.
You know … I’m kind of missing it. Not!
I come from the Midwest, where men are men, women are women, dogs live outside, cats are for mousing and winter white-outs with six-foot drifts are a given. In saying this, I certainly don’t mean to denigrate the city of Newcastle’s snow removal efforts last year, which were yeoman. And really, if you don’t think that their efforts were laudable, then you didn’t drive or walk the streets and sidewalks of downtown Seattle during that time.
I experienced my first snowstorm here in 1972. I was a playground supervisor at a school atop Mercer Island when it started to snow during the lunch hour. The children were thrilled, but the teachers were stricken, their pale faces continually peering out the windows at the heavy gray sky. Soon, they were sending children into the playground with rulers to measure how deep the snow was. The school had a two-inch policy, and when it hit two inches, school was dismissed.
I was amused. Then, I got in my car to head home. I maneuvered easily down the sinuous hills toward Interstate 90. I was used to driving on this stuff. No big deal! Then, I got to the freeway onramp (which I had mistakenly assumed would be either plowed or salted) and went down it backward. The trip home usually took 15 minutes, but a full two hours later, I stomped into my parents’ house, threw down the car keys and declared that I would never ever drive in the snow with these idiot Washington weenies again.
And then, after about 10 years, I morphed into one of those idiot Washington weenies myself.
Hey, it happens.
Reach Pat Detmer, Snow Queen Weenie, at patdetmer@aol.com.
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