Finally get the son’s car
out of the driveway after waiting out the snow for more than a month. Oh, sure, the car has gone to the church
parking lot a few hundred feet away during one of the first major snowstorms in
January so I could shovel, and it has moved back and forth in the reasonably short driveway. But it doesn’t hit the road until today.
Why?
Because I couldn’t see
over the snowbanks until today. Truth
is, I still can’t really see over the snowbanks, but it seems a disservice to
the vehicle to let it warm up nearly every day just to sit by itself. So, today, after some “warm days” (it has hit
24 degrees three days in a row) and some minor melting, I take the Lancer out
for a drive.
I don’t want to go too
far, and I want to stick as closely as I can to traffic lights just in case,
but I also know this poor car probably needs a good, long drive after the snow
and frigid temps we’ve had. I have a few
errands to run – CVS and the post office – so the Lancer and I get that boring
stuff out of the way first.
Just as I pull back to out
to the main road, flurries start, not big giant snowflakes flurries, but little
splotches of tiny flakes on the windshield.
Here we go again, I
lament. At the risk of the car being
snowed in yet again, I drive a few miles to the highway and open the car up for
a few more miles before exiting at a ramp with a traffic light (just in case of high
snowbanks).
By the time I reach the
center of town again, the flurries have stopped. I circle around by the churches and
cemeteries so I can check out the rest of the roof of my house, the part I can’t
see from the patio, the part that lost a huge amount of snow and ice
yesterday. I can see that all but the
icicles along the edges have cleared and the shingles are all intact.
As I back the kid’s car
into its spot, the flurries start again. When the storm gets here in earnest, it is
supposed to leave several inches of snow in its wake (a manageable amount after
what we’ve dealt with). It will probably
be just enough to create snowbanks slightly too high to take the Lancer out
again for a while. It’s okay, though;
spring is three weeks away. I can wait
it out.
