As most readers of this blog know (and if you don’t you’ll soon find out) I live about 15 miles south of Washington D.C. Now under usual circumstances this means I get cold, dry winters and long, almost unbearably hot summers. I live in a small cul-de-sac surrounded by woodland, and am used to seeing almost as many helicopters making the trip between Qantico and The Pentagon as birds on the bird feeders. What I am not used to is large snowfalls!
Now don’t get me wrong, I love snow and in my first few years here I revelled in the fact that this area was “well prepared” and would laugh at a mere 2-4inches of the white stuff that would have thrown England into gridlock and panic. However, this winter all that has changed, and we’ve had two major storms that have dropped over 46inches of snow so far this winter. 46inches of snow is a lot of snow, and to make matters worse tonight it is snowing AGAIN! We’ve just about shoveled out the 21-23inches that fell over the weekend, and now another 8-14inches is falling. It has reached the stage now where I see the prediction of 8-14inches and think “Phew, that won’t be too much to shovel!”
One of the positive things with all this snowfall has been seeing how my small neighbourhood copes with the bad weather. As the storm blew in on Friday night a tree fell, almost hitting several cars and completely blocking the road. The fact that it was 11pm and the middle of a blizzard did not stop 5-6 volunteers joining me with chainsaws and shovels to clear the road, and dig out the pavements in the wee small hours. We eventually retired well past 1am, only to get up and do it all again on Saturday. Sunday saw all of my immediate neighbours outside shoveling, clowning around, and helping each other dig out cars and pathways. During normal weather we all work busy lives in a variety of offices and government jobs across the metro area, and we might not see folks to talk to from one month to the next but give us a situation like this and everybody mucks in together and we keep things moving.
I was going to embed some photographs of the snow in this post, but realised I’d taken too many, so instead I’ll just insert this one. If you want to see more click the picture and it will take you to my Snowpocalypse II photo set on Flickr.
