All our work on the Bernie campaign produced a 78% win for him among Idaho Democrats. Truly wonderful and remarkable. Then two days of glorious weather have me acting as if it’s spring: cleaning the garden, shopping for plants, but I know it’s false hope. That was a few days ago, before I spent four hours in half a foot of the new, heavy, wet snow that falls this time of year (knocking the power out, too, of course) with the tow truck to get my RAV out of the culvert next to the drive up to Keith’s pond.
Everything started so well, and then the freezing rain began. I left for yoga at 7:20 and was returning on ice-slick roads from a wonderful class. Carefully navigating the steep, slush-covered drive, I was stopped dead just above the culvert, blocked by an enormous, 80-foot pine that had fallen across the drive. I had no way to drag it out of the way and, with my neighbor out of the country, no one to cut it up and clear it with his chainsaw. Nothing but to try to back back down with limited rear visibility. Near the bottom I decided to back into the pond drive to turn around, but as I made the turn, slipping sideways, the weight of the engine slid the front end in seeming slow motion off into the culvert, wedging the front bumper against the ground and leaving the driver’s tire dangling. That bumper saved me from rolling. No way a pickup would pull me out of that.
It took a long wait for a large tow truck and a long winch line wrapped around two trees to ease the car backwards up the incline to get me back on four wheels. Meantime, the tow truck slid off the drive, but my neighbor with her trusty pickup got it back out. Quite the fiasco. I called around and found someone to get the tree off the drive for a usurer’s ransom. Someone else pushed the slush off the drive to make it passable, and I have spent the past two days in pure recovery mode. Living in these woods in my sixties definitely has its challenges.
March 24, 2016
Ruminations 