SLOGGING THROUGH WINTER… Good & bad (Part 169s)
One thing you
really can’t know when you buy a house is what your neighbors will be
like. Elle and I were really lucky to have John (the farmer) and his
wife, Kathleen, for ours. Before the phone went out, John had let me
know he couldn’t do anything with our driveway because it was pure ice.
However, just before dark there was a knock on our kitchen door. It was
John with a burlap bag in his hands. He told me that he’d spread some
rock salt on the upper part of the driveway (it was a hill about 35 feet
in length) and that his brother, a cop, was at the bottom doing the
same thing. He also let me know the primary cause of the power outage
was at a sub-station of the electric company. His brother had gotten the
word at the police station where they had a generator and still had
radio communications. However, he warned that with the rain stopping and
the wind picking up there would be a lot of tree limbs coming down
which might factor into us getting our power back. Then he did something
that was totally unexpected. We’d bought the house from his uncle and
he was very familiar with it to the point of knowing that everything in
the kitchen was electric. He told me he’d be back in a short while with a
pot of warm soup that his wife was making for us. You can’t buy
neighbors like that.
When Elle and I headed for bed the
temperature in the house was at around 65 degrees. We had the girls wear
pants and a sweater to bed with the idea of pulling the extra blanket
up over them sometime during the night. Elle dug out a pair of her knit
pants and then wore a light cardigan sweater to go with it and I went
with just a sweat shirt. All we could do was to hope it didn’t get too
cold. I brought one of the outdoor thermometers upstairs so we could
check on how cold it got when Elle got up for her bathroom trips. By 4am
the temperature was down below 60 degrees and she pulled the all the
blankets up. If it weren’t for that fact I never would’ve heard the loud
“crrraaackk”. It actually frightened me. Still in bed, I wasn’t sure
where it had come from… inside or outside. Armed with a flashlight that
was dying, I headed down the stairs. I checked all the windows and none
were broken. But, there was no way I was going outside with all that
ice. I’d only been out of bed maybe 8 to 10 minutes but, without
pants, I was cold! I was wide awake and still curious as to what I’d
heard so I thought about getting dressed. Elle heard me come back and
told me she and Kaye needed my “body heat” and to hurry to get back in
bed.
Sleeping fitfully until I saw it getting light outside I
finally gave up and dressed. There was enough light to do a cursory
check out all the windows and when I got to the Northeast corner of the
house (our dining room) and looked out the Easterly facing window I had
my answer. I’ve written about the house next door and how the Westerly
facing rooms didn’t get much light due to how tall and full the willow
tree that was right on the property line for the two houses. With all
the ice that had accumulated during the storm one big branch broke off
from the trunk of the tree and was now resting against the house. Before
going out to see how much damage it had done to the house I checked the
inside temperature and it was now down to around 55 degrees. A check of
the outside temperature showed it to be around 20 degrees. The strong
winds had managed to break a lot of the small twigs that had been covered
with ice off all the trees and they had fallen to the ground making a
sparkling sight with the sunlight now on them. I remember thinking “… do I
really want to go out there?”, but I dressed warmly and made my way over
to the other house. As I carefully made my way I was hoping there
wouldn’t be any damage but there was. The branch had
brushed by the upstairs window breaking the large lower portion. I had to
fight my way through the limbs to get a look at the first floor windows
and it didn’t look good. I remember that there was part of the limb that
had forced itself into the living room.
Since there was nothing I
could do I headed back to the house. Elle and all the girls were up,
dressed and with their coats on. “Let’s go to your parents.” was more of
an order than a suggestion. They had a large generator that was able to
take care of some lights and the water pump but it was not powerful
enough to handle the electric baseboard heat. The house had a very large
fireplace in the great room and, growing up, I remember sitting in
front of it on snowy, stormy nights and enjoying the direct warmth from
it. It had to have been over a dozen years since I’d witnessed a fire in
the fireplace but I also remembered that my father had wood stored
“just in case”. While outside checking on the neighbor’s house I also
checked our driveway to see if the salt spread by John (the
farmer/neighbor) the night before had done any good. There was still
some ice but a lot had melted and there were bare spots all the way
down. It was worth taking a chance. The roads themselves had been deiced
by mid afternoon the day before so I wasn’t concerned about them.
Taking a deep breath, Elle packed some spare clothes and some food and
we all and headed for the garage. At least there was no problem getting
into the station wagon.
We didn’t see much in the way of tree
damage until we got to the Catholic Church. The road it was on was
impassable with tree limbs and debris. The long way around took us past
the fringes of the village and there was saw a couple of large limbs had
fallen across the entryway of the Methodist Church. I had a brief
thought to go check on our church but dismissed it. The immediate goal
was to get warm in front of a roaring fire. I should’ve anticipated what
we’d find on the road to our destination. There were both men and women
out dragging limbs off to the side of the road. To expedite the process
both Elle and I joined in. I wasn’t all that happy about it but the
activity did get both of us warm. Finally reaching my parents house they
told us they were surprised it had taken so long for us to show up.
They thought we would’ve come the day before. Elle and I were surprised
to find that her parents were there as well as Dolly, the daughter of
one of their long time friends. It had been almost five years since we’d
last seen her. As soon as I did it brought back some (panty peek)
memories of when she’d stayed with us when we still lived in our mobile
home. Since then her parents had died and she’d come out from the city
on Friday to sign papers turning the ownership of their house over to
her. My mother, always persuasive, had convinced her to stay overnight
and she’d gotten caught by the storm. She was now married and was no
longer the teen ager that I remembered. Always a big boned girl, she had
thinned out and looked good. It was kind of strange seeing her dressed
in a suit though and I commented on it. She said since she hadn’t
planned of staying over it was all she had. The girls were a little shy
around her at first. Kaye was just a baby when she’d stayed with us and
Dolly couldn’t get over how she’d grown.
I passed on the
information I’d gotten from John, our farmer neighbor, about the power
substation problem to which my father surmised that might be a blessing
in disguise. He explained that when there is a concentrated problem it’s
easier to fix than having to track down a lot of little ones. I did
remind him of all the tree limbs which I’d encountered on the way over
and all he could do was shrug his shoulders. All I could do was hope it
wouldn’t be too long.
To be continued...
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