One lousy inch of snow overnight put me into the dooryard after my weekly breakfast with the boys and a stop off at my parent’s place.
By mid-morning, the temperatures were rising, but I decided to plow the pile left at the mouth of the driveway by state-sanctioned plow trucks. Then I scraped up the rest with my shovel.
If you live in a spot where you are sure to be over thirty-five degrees for the next few days, you can leave it to melt on its own. But melting during the day adds ice overnight. Then, the snow, in its new form, stays for a long time.
Breaking a hip is a reality that I ponder. More now since retirement. I don’t feel in any worse condition than before retirement, and I have pretty good bones (like an old house), but someone has to take the dog outside, so I am accountable if I lose mobility.
If you’ve purchased my books or read them at the library, you will note that I frequently write about the sun on my face. It is one of those feelings that makes me feel most alive. There is at least one essay in everything that I write that references one of my favorite feelings.
The sun might not have that same effect on you, especially if you are dwelling in a warmer climate, but I don’t. Over the years, I’ve also watched all my dogs select a spot in the house that draws the best sunbeam. Dogs are not wrong, and neither am I.
When it’s cold outside, if you mill about within striking distance of a sunbeam, you’ve hit the gee-I-feel-good lottery.
I presented myself to the sunbeam on the driveway at exactly the right time. It was about noon. The temperatures were in the low thirties, so there was no need for a coat—just a flannel shirt, Pandora on my iPhone speaker, and Ellie milling around the yard.
I enjoyed a bit of Sade while I scraped up the de minimus build-up of flakes. Snowflakes might all be unique, but they look the same when you gather them together—similar to people.
Yes, I grew up with and worked in Top 40 radio. Yes, I like something from about every genre, but Sade has always been one of my favorite performers.
I’ve taken some flack from the boys in my inner circle, but theorizing that Sade is not fit to play when fishing a few miles up-lake with the lads is high-level toxic masculinity.
Nope, she sure ain’t Waylon, but you listen to her inflection and the clarity of her smooth-as-silk vocals in the jazz-club-level arrangements and then tell me I’m crazy. The eighties had some great music.
Rest-in-Peace Luther Vandross. He’s another one who I have been ribbed about cranking up to nine on the dump-recovered Klipsch sound boxes surrounding my writing zone.
Today’s recipe for success was fresh frozen precipitation, a sunbeam, some “Kiss of Life” from Sade, and the light aerobic delightfulness of scraping snow from the pavement. That’s one heck of a boost in a boy’s biorhythms.
I don’t hate February today.
I should tell you that AC/DC’s “Jailbreak” came after Sade, and I felt equally euphoric.
I digress.
TC
&
Ellie