Snow Struggles: The Sequel

Okay, you guys! Remember how, after I walked myself to Stewart’s because I was so petrified of snowy driving, I heroically made it home from Binghamton through a huge snowstorm? I am still making note of the fact that I didn’t crash in my gratitude journal!

And then, I thought I was done. Sure, snow was coming. But me? I didn’t have anywhere to go! I was hunkering down for the next several days. Cute W had picked up milk. Heck, I could walk to Stewart’s for milk. You know I can walk to Stewart’s.

Actually, poor Cute W had a work thing that started on Sunday afternoon in downtown Albany and was continuing today. Originally he would have gone back and forth, but with the coming snowstorm he ended up getting a hotel room. I told him to take my car, which is much better in snow than his, because I was not going anywhere. We had groceries to tide us over. The Snow Day calculator was clocking in at 99%. There was nothing on our agenda that couldn’t be done from the comfort of home.

Except then, school had only a 2-hour delay. And M’s ride to school fell through. Which we didn’t realize until it felt too late for her to walk. By the time I processed this information and hopped in the car, we were just barely going to make it, and I was smacking into the harsh reality that I’d have to drive. In snow. In the “bad” snow car.

Luckily, or maybe luckily, I don’t really know–it’s like that Zen Buddhist farmer story–I never made it farther than the driveway. I didn’t even get that far in the driveway. I got about, umm, here:

Why, yes, that’s one of the tiniest cars you can find on the market today. Yes, it’s in a driveway that is designed to accommodate at least three cars abreast, and Cute W, my neighbor, and I had spent literally hours clearing said driveway. And yet, I somehow managed to back the car out of the garage in such a way that it became wedged between walls of snow along the edges of the driveway. I mean, I think that your average driver could not manage this feat if he or she tried. I desperately tried to avoid it. But I am a truly remarkable.

If there’s something more awesome than alternating between shoveling out your car and wedging your car further into the teensiest portion of the driveway, the place most likely to lead to hurting both your car and your home. . . . Well, you might think that there’s nothing more awesome, but there is: it’s doing it all in the presence of an increasingly agitated 14-year-old. I told her to give up and start walking a few times before she really believed me.

I dashed off a tardy note and she took off for school grossly under-dressed for the long walk in freezing temperatures looking like she was just barely holding it together. I spent another half hour after she left alternately digging and attempting to drive. I had a moment where I thought about hitting the car with a shovel and about three minutes where I considered asking my 12-year-old to push the car for me. But let’s face it, at the rate I was going, I would probably have managed to squash her into a snowbank. So instead I just asked for my gloves and shooed her back inside. When, not much later, she realized that she was running late for school, she didn’t even mention the possibility of a ride. She just took a deep breath and sank up to her knees in snow to run through the shortcut.