Winter Wonderland

Well, it's Theme Thursday again (thank goodness since I'm way behind on blogging!) and this week's theme is winter. And maybe it's the close proximity of the holidays that got me nostalgic but the topic got me thinking about winters back home.

I’m in Oklahoma now and the winters are pretty mild. But I grew up and lived most of my adult life in the Midwest and though I miss my family like crazy, I don’t miss those brutal Midwest winters…Sub-zero temperatures, ice, snow, and three ugly words: SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE.

I learned all about SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTES my last winter in Illinois after a storm that dumped ten inches of snow overnight.

Did you know that if you live on a SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE and you don’t move your car out of the street, they (those evil city workers) will plow the snow right over your car? Right over it! They don’t care that it’s your only mode of transportation, they don’t care that you didn’t know it was a SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE…all they know is if it’s in the way, they will plow. And if your car is a cute yet tiny Mazda Miata, it is entirely possible for you to go out one frosty morning and find that the snow is literally taller than the top of your car.

Some people have been known to scream and throw horrible tantrums when this occurs. Guess how long it took me to dig my car out?

TWO HOURS!

Though, to be fair, this is possibly due to the fact that I lived in an apartment then and didn’t actually own a shovel…instead, I was forced to use a kitchen broom. I truly believe that if my little neighbor boys hadn’t come by to help me dig and if these two hicks (nice guys but we’re talking men with no front teeth here) hadn’t come by in their truck and plowed around the front of the car, then the following spring city workers would have found my poor, dead body, still clinging to my frozen car door. NOT THAT THE CITY WORKERS WOULD HAVE CARED, EVIL FIENDS THAT THEY ARE! Think this saga is done? Oh, think again! I still had to MOVE the car, if I would have left it on the street, it would have been buried again. Plus I could have received tickets totaling two hundred dollars for violating the SNOW EMERGENCY ROUTE!

So, after this ordeal, I had to drive the car over to my parents’ business to park it in their garage. This should have been easy; the business is 10 minutes away.At least it is in the summer…or if you’re driving anything other than a Mazda Miata.

I think I can say with one hundred percent certainty that I was the only Mazda Miata on the road during that particular snow storm. And you’d be surprised how many people (mainly the people who stopped to push me through various and sundry snow-covered intersections) think this is not a car to be driven in the winter. Then, once I finally arrived, I couldn’t even get into the parking lot because it was very early in the morning and no one had been able to get out and plow yet.

Some people would have given up at this point and abandoned the car. Not me. I bravely decided to slide around the block and try to go down the back alley.

That’s right, the back alley. For some reason, I decided that the seldom-used, off the beaten path, back alley was going to be more plowed than the parking lot. Clearly, I was the victim of snow-induced hysteria.

In any case, it took me about twenty seconds to get completely, irrevocably stuck. Luckily these three guys in a truck saw me and came around, backed down the alley and hooked a chain to my car so they could drag me up the alley to the lot…which was great until one of them said, “We’ll probably be going pretty fast when we get to the top of the hill so slam on your brakes or you might slide into me.”

Not the most comforting phrase, to say the least.

Then, once I did safely make it to the parking lot, my brother came running out to help me push my car into the garage. This is when it sucks to be a modern feminist woman. He was in his best suit, I was in sweatpants; I couldn’t very well say “Yes, I’m a helpless woman, please push me.” As a modern feminist woman I had to say “Why don’t you steer? I’ll push.”

Luckily my brother is not a big believer in these ridiculous feminist sentiments and there was no way he was going to steer while his sister pushed the car.

I should have felt guilty but I figure it’s not my fault if this male-dominated society refuses to acknowledge my God-given right to wade in the snow.


We haven’t had anything like that in Oklahoma (yet) and I hope we don’t…because I still have a Miata and I still don’t want to push my car up an alley. But at least I have a shovel! Check out the other Theme Thursday posts at: