Thursday, December 28, 2017

Cold Day in New Hampshire

My porch thermometer read zero degrees this morning.
But it wasn't windy, so it wasn't bad walking across the snow bank back down to the woods behind my house.
Tugboat, the Labrador, pooped promptly, when he walked out into the cold.
M. Le Boat walks on padded paws, but he was getting ice in between his pads and he turned around to return home, where he knew his breakfast would be waiting.

I walked across the street, up my neighbor's steep driveway to toss his morning papers on his porch. That driveway is potentially lethal, or at the very least, it's an orthodedic nightmare for any bipedal  with a hip.  It is very steep and trying to get down to the newspapers in their plastic sleeves,  lying on that slope is a test of daring. I've seen ski jump approaches less steep than that driveway. So I toss those papers up, to his porch.

That gets me good press in the neighborhood, but it's mostly selfish on my part: If the neighbor winds up on his back on that driveway, I'm not going to be able to just go back to starting my snow-blower, or drinking hot chocolate. So, better to keep your neighbor safe on his porch.

Temperatures increased four fold by the time I got to work. The twenty mile drive south into Massachusetts saw the thermometer in my car rise from 1 to 4 degrees F.

I walked from the parking lot with just my scarf and my L.L. Bean quilt lined wool jacket and was perfectly comfortable by the time I reached my office building, although my fingers had frozen around the handles of my briefcase, and that took a while of thawing at my desk.

The wind picked up later in the day and people failed to keep their appointments at the office.

People who did come in were happy to be here. There's a sort of camaraderie of the frozen. People who make it in smile like people getting off an airplane. Just happy to have arrived safely, into a warm place.

I'll never understand why people would miss all this for Florida.




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