Just so you all aren't picturing me in a beautiful snowy wonderland, I should let you know that Tuesday, the day after the big snowfall, the temps reached the high 30s and it rained all that night, melting most of the snow and making everything (very much including my driveway) muddy and gross.
BUT! Not all the effects of the snow have disappeared this week. Oh no. One, very personal reminder, lingers. I actually pulled on my completely
inadequate footwear and went out on Monday and shoveled the dense, wet, very very heavy snow (using a normal shovel, because of course I haven't gotten a snow shovel yet) and now, almost a week later, I still ache. Isn't that pathetic? The muscle soreness is finally gone but my neck/shoulder region is seriously janked. (I know, I should take advantage of the spa discount and get a massage. But . . . it feels strange to get a massage from someone I work with. Brow waxing? Facial? No problem! But a massage just seems too . . . I don't know. Something. It's my own hangup. The therapists are always getting massages from each other, so I know I'm being stupid. I'm sure I'll get over it before this little interlude in my life ends.) Of course, the fact that the snow had mostly disappeared the day after I had killed myself shoveling it out of my way just adds the proper coda of wasted effort to the physical discomfort.
On Friday evening, just as it was getting dark, I got an excited voicemail from one of my neighbors telling me to look out my window because there were six elk grazing in the pasture between our houses. Unfortunately, I was working and by the time I got home they were gone. But yesterday I went for a walk and just as I was approaching a bend in the road, two elk leaped across my path. I stopped and watched in awe as a steady stream of them came bounding up from the river and started climbing a ridge where my mother pastured horses before I was born, and where, when I was a child, we had a memorable encounter with a black bear while picking huckleberries one fall. I lost count at 15, and they just kept coming. There must have been at least 40. I was both too startled and too slow to get a decent picture. Can you even see them in the trees?
On a smaller scale, but just as startling, I saw this tiny creature skittering through the snow 15 yards or so from my front door when I set out for my winter walk. Guess what direction he was traveling? It had never occurred to me that spiders could survive in the open in such cold. He made good time. By the time I saw him on my return trip he'd covered about half the distance to my significantly cozier home (where, sadly, he'd find plenty of other creatures to keep his strength up until spring when I wouldn't feel so evil about banishing him back outside).
