I’ve given this a lot of thought lately and I’ve decided that when God thought about punishment for bad behavior, that is when he thought up winter. And lately, I’ve been leading a pretty sinful life apparently, because all of the joys of winter are upon us!
I don’t want to say that I’m sick of snow already, but…okay, I’ll say it: I’m sick of snow already! It’s bad enough when it snows and then the sun shines, but when you go through days and days of continual flakes flying and just enough to mess up the roads—heaven forbid we should get a snow day or something—it becomes a showy snowjob!
I hate shoveling more than anything. I can bundle up all I want, and something always freezes before I have transferred the layer of snow on the sidewalk into a pile on the lawn. Usually, I have my chest wrapped in fourteen sweaters and my neck and shoulders are sweltering in the scarves and I am wearing, but I have never figured out how to keep breezes out. There is always a trickle of cold air sliding up one sleeve or snaking around one cold ankle and up the pantleg. Then there are my hands, which are either warm and stiff in enough layers of gloves, or cold because I need to move my fingers to shovel.
The worst part has happened since I got glasses. If I wrap myself up well, I am always blowing warm breath on my glasses and eventually, I have such a layer of ice on the lenses that I can see better if I take them off! If I avoid wrapping my face so tight, they do their ice-over routine in the house. In desperation, I went out shoveling one time without them and ended up shoveling a nice, crooked path across the lawn!
Winter diseases have struck as well. If someone isn’t coughing up a lung in line behind me, someone manages to throw up during a noon-day lunch. These diseases are so friendly, they always want to spread their germs around! It’s inevitable that about the time the first cold weather strikes I get the cold that just won’t end and of course, like a good wife, I share it with Roy. After a while we are both popping Vitamin C like drug dealers and the evenings are full of so much coughing we sound like a chorus for some weird, hacking opera. Take my advice, don’t buy tickets for a performance!
In our house, winter is also the season when things fail. The rule is that the colder and the darker it is, the more likely it is that something will fail. Now, I can’t even begin to tell you all the joys of having a sewer pump go out, but I can tell you that I have never had to help change one in the summer. The two I have been involved in replacing were both done on a late, cold January night, when we were attempting to keep the sewer from backing up into the basement.
There’s also the time when I froze my coat to the roof while trying to pour water into a vent to open it up. Beyond that the things most likely to fail are garage doors when a blizzard is blowing and you have to get out of the car to drag the door open, the snowblower, when the snow is piled up hip high or best of all, the furnace, when the weather has turned to subzero highs. All of these are joyous memories of winter and I wish I thought that those kinds of memories were behind me, but I don’t like the sound of the heaters in the basement and the doorbell has chosen this opportune season to retire.
Now, I know that you are all going to tell me that you don’t enjoy these winter weather blues any more than I do, but I know that someone out there must have truly misbehaved to get us to these snowy and really cold days. So as I wrap myself in three blankets and pop cough drops like peanuts, I would like to ask all of you: can’t we just behave ourselves? Then maybe God will bring spring on earlier this year!
© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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