Monday, 8:45 AM. –3 degrees, wind WNW, gusty. It is still snowing lightly and visibility is maybe two hundred yards. The barometer predicts clear skies, which means the temperature will plummet.
The drive is cleared except for the plug at the end where the city plow will almost certainly fill it up again so I won’t clear it until I need to go to the post office late morning. I have shoveled at least 16” of snow from the drive, and factoring in drifting I estimate we have gotten at least 12” of fallen snow so far. I put on my long underwear and wool deer hunting pants and was quite comfortable, except my bare fingers wanted to freeze to the metal parts of the bird feeders while I filled them (the juncos look like feathered tennis balls all puffed up against the cold). I remember well the admonition, “don’t put your tongue on the pump handle” when I was a kid, even though there weren’t many pump handles still around. Nevertheless, some dumb kid in the schoolyard took a dare to put his tongue on the metal post of the swings, and it was an object lessen to all.
Lucky and Roxie don’t mind the weather, even without long underwear. The old Boston Whaler is encountering rough seas.
There is still lots of snow clearing to do today, and between times I will read Admiral Bird’s “Little America,” his journal account of the 1928 expedition to the South Pole, which was my mother’s book, but why she was so interested I have no idea. Anyway it is a fitting read for a blizzard, and also because at this very time Andy and Judy Larsen’s son Erick is leading a group of tourists, would you believe, to the South Pole on skis!
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