Salt Lake City is a far cry from Phoenix. First, and best, I'm able finally to relax here, responsibilities eased, even sleeping through the nights again. No more - for now anyway - sleeping for 4 hours, then waking, brain cells scrambling and churning, worrying over each and every detail done or undone, left to do or yet forgotten.
Second, and most physically obvious, there's about 4" of snow over everything. It started working its way in by late in the morning. Not snow, not yet, but much like an Arizona haboob, a big dust cloud on the leading edge of abrupt weather change, one bringing a lot of moisture. In AZ it's brown. Here it's white. It puzzled me. Didn't look like fog exactly. No arriving dumping of snow ever looked like that to me. So of course I asked and was informed what was arriving was salt, the dust left by a shrinking Salt Lake. So it's full of all the pollutants which get dumped by all the sewage systems which eventually flow downhill, and the most down hill of the geography here is the Lake. And still it shrinks. I found myself trying not to breathe.
It was after lunch that the first moisture started to fall. I can't say it was frozen yet, as looking through the window it was water as it hit the screens. But shortly it was seen to be falling bits of white, later growing into the old familiar snow of most of my life. It began to accumulate, making the world clean, beautiful, and fairly soon, laden down. Branches drooped, ornamental grasses bent to kiss the hidden lawns, the shapes and colors that delineated my car on the street became jumbled lumps of white.
The camera came out of course. It's not that I haven't seen snow, but that it's been so long. And only now do I have a good camera to shoot it and make digital pictures.
Morning gave a different side to the snow. The cold. The mess. The possibility of frozen water bottles and other beverage containers in the car, making a mess from being ignored. And of course, another forgotten "joy"of scraping snow and ice off everything so I could break into my own car to retrieve what I came out there to find. About half an hour later I finally got a door open. Turned out it had been so long since I'd had to fight iced doors I'd forgotten the need to make sure they were unlocked first. My electronic key system lasts about half a minute to unlock a car door, and if one hasn't opened it in that time, it reverts to locked. This was way past that time until I finally remembered the need. Much of the car was cleared of ice by then except for the roof, and I sat inside, turned it on, and waited for heat. Once we got some, water ran down windows and I had a clear second look at a very bent wiper blade which had previously been pulled from where it was stuck in ice. As soon as it was dropped on the windshield it was flat again, to my relief, but when puled up off, the curve returned. I left it down after that. Maybe it will straighten.
I'd gone out to the car to check for messes from liquids frozen overnight in ruptured bottles, as I am in the habit of traveling with bottled water. There was also pop in large bottles on the floor of the back seat. Finding all intact and liquid was a relief - another lesson relearned painlessly. Another reason was because Steve wished a trip to Walmart. Plus that I go through the car's contents to locate his heavy new winter jacket. It wasn't in the first couple places I looked, and by now I was on the point of shivering. I was in regular shoes and socks, plus a sweatshirt over the regular shirt. It was too cold for me to care to continue. In addition it was too slick for Steve's footware to give him traction on the snowy/slushy ground, and who knew what we'd find at a store parking lot? I arbitrarily shut the car off and decided for both of us that trip wasn't happening. We'd work around it.
Besides, breakfast was needed. And a warm blanket. And some unfrozen liquid. Maybe after that, taking Steve's rice sock, heating it in the microwave, and moving it over my legs to warm them up like it had done last night. I'd been cold all day yesterday before resorting to that. I didn't want to repeat that mistake again. There'd been enough others.
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