Snow, Snowblowers and Other Hateful Things

There I stood, sweat streaming down my face, in spite of the 10-below-zero temperature.

“That #$%^ snow blower,” was all I could think. I had been trying to get it started forever.

Fifty pulls of the cord, maybe a hundred, or ten thousand.

Still, it didn’t start.

In desperation, I looked around my machine shed.

“Maybe if I just threw a match into the gas tank,” I said out loud. “Then all of my troubles would be over.”

I decided against the murder-suicide scenario, and looked around some more. I spied an old hairdryer.

“I try warming the thing up, before I blow it up,” I said to one of the barn cats that drifted through the shed.

I plugged in the dryer, aimed the warm air at the carburetor for a few minutes and pulled the cord.

The snowblower started right up.

That, in a nutshell, is why I love hairdryers and hate snow and anything related to it.

I thought of that scenario from our time in Minnesota last Sunday. Snow was accumulating on our yard, and though it certainly wasn’t anything to rival a good old-fashioned Minnesota blizzard, it was enough to give me the willies.

I have had it with snow. When we moved to Oregon from Minnesota, nearly everyone I met said approximately the same thing.

“Well, at least you don’t have to shovel the rain,” they said.

Amen to that, brothers and sisters.

In my book, one flake of snow is one too many. That we had even a brief appearance of the white stuff last weekend indicated to me that maybe it’s time to move south.

I keep hearing about global warming, and if it has to do with the complete lack of snow around me, I’m all for it. In fact, I was going to call Al Gore, Mr. Global Warming himself, on Sunday and invite him over to shovel off my globally warmed driveway.

It’s not that snow is bad as a theory. People ski, snowboard and sled in the snow and have a great time, in between trips to the emergency room.

I never really saw the attraction.

You may ask, “If you hate snow, why did you live in Minnesota for seven years and Alaska for 20 years before that?”

That, as they say, is the $64,000 question.

I used to like snow, but, like many people who have been exposed to massive overdoses of it, I’ve been cured.

I’ve hitchhiked in the snow, gotten cars stuck in the snow, put up mailboxes in the snow and, worst of all, run snowblowers in the snow.

When you’re worrying about your chances of survival, it’s hard to see a lot a beauty in all of that white stuff.

That, in summary, is why I’m more than a little edgy about any appearance of snow on my front yard.

Thank goodness, the other day it disappeared almost as fast as it arrived. It saved me a lot of money.

Now I can cancel my plane tickets to Ecuador.