Trenchwork

You know that lovely pile of snow I showed you a day or so ago? Take another look.

That slightly uneven ice rink? The front yard. The photos were taken from the step at the front door. The lighting is poor, but what you’re looking at is a layer of packed snow which melted (mostly) in this week’s warmer temps, then refroze into a solid sheet of ice, and now—after the occasional rain or sleet of the past couple of days—has a thin layer of water on top.

I really do like winter. Honestly. I love snow, and the crisp cold clarity of winter days. But this stuff? Forget it. The Norwegians manage it with at least some degree of grace. I end up bearing a marked resemblance to a bad imitation of Bambi-on-ice. This is the stuff which makes me grateful all my work can be done from home today, and makes me decide to let the garbage wait another day before it goes out. (By the way, the garbage can? It’s that green square over on the corner of the building—across the ice.)

DH has told me that there’s only one way to navigate this stuff: pretend you’re old. Very old. All that chest out, shoulders back, stand tall, 22-inch stride stuff you learned in the military and still naturally lean toward when you walk? Forget it. Try it and you’ll be flat on your back and seeing stars before you can hum the first note of the national anthem. ANY national anthem. Instead, the idea is to hunch slightly so that if you go down, you go down forward on hands and knees rather than backward and crack your skull against the ice. Take small steps. A 12-inch stride is big; think 7. Forget your heels; flat-foot it. And that’s with studded shoes.

I haven’t mastered that. I’ve gotten much better, but I’m still a disaster on the stuff, and DH is terrified I’ll break something one day. For his part, he’s had a lifetime to learn it, and I cannot think of one time when he’s put a pair of no-slip snow grabbers on his shoes. You know what I mean? The metal-studded rubber straps which fit around your shoes to give you traction? Not in ten years of marriage can I recall ever seeing him actually use a pair.

Until this morning. And he was only trying to get to the garage (the building in the photo).

By the way, that yellowish scattering of stuff in the photo on the left? That’s bread for the birds. They’re the only ones who manage this stuff relatively well, and that’s largely because they’re not on it for more than a minute. Although, I have to say that the magpie I saw sliding down the slope toward the bread didn’t look altogether happy . . .