I guess “brutal” depends on what you’re used to.
This one has been relentless, though, even if the sun is shining most of the time. In every other winter I’ve spent here, by this time there’d have been a major thaw or two to let you catch your breath, or did I just imagine that? This winter it’s just stayed frozen hard without a letup, more like what people tell me from the old days. It’s supposed to warm up a bit over the weekend, so they say.
We had a little more snow yesterday, came in horizontally at 50 miles per hour, and then the temperature dropped and refroze the all snow that had finally turned to slush after lying there for six weeks. It’s simply madness to step outside where we live, because of the sloping hillside of solid ice. The road isn’t too bad, but portions are a sea of mud. Other parts of town are much worse. What’s maddening is that we’re having everything at once. You can have your legs go out from underneath you on the ice and end up flat on your face in the mud. I’ve never had it be so physically dangerous and messy at the same time. Oh, and it just got cold again. Nineteen degrees at 7:31 p.m., heading down to single digits.
There’s a lot more snow on the mountains. That’s a consolation of sorts. Oh, we’re surviving just fine, but that takes up more time and energy than most people imagine. Almost any time you go outside, you have to clean off your boots afterwards. First you have to put them on, of course, and clomp on out the door. When you come back in with a load of wood, you have to stop just inside the door and somehow get your boots off with one hand while juggling chunks of snow-covered piñon with the other. Yes, I know. Most of the time that’s impossible, so I just make tracks on the carpet and clean that up later. But a simple trip outside to grab some fuel now entails several other tasks.
And then I caught a cold that migrated to my head bones, and now I’m nearly deaf. That’s the worst thing of all, I think, to be cut off from the sounds of the surrounding world. This is also why I dislike listening to music through earphones. It just makes me tense. Anyway, my hearing — such as it is — will return as soon as the evil leaves my sinuses. Actually, I can hear a little better now, so good.
Overlooking these things, all is well. But we’re hammered every day by cold, ice, and mud, and it takes a toll. I carry as much wood into the house at one time as I can, and a couple of hours later it’s all gone. I don’t really mind the work, but I wish the wood were cheaper or lasted longer. It’s such a constant, ongoing physical contest to chop it up, bring it in, and burn it before the cold settles in and changes everything.
That does have a certain appeal, however: let everything freeze and break while we run off to the nearest hot springs or high-tail it down to Mexico. Come back in the spring, just in time for all the blowing dust.
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