Introduction
Dear reader,
I was prepared to post Part 1 last week but we were in the midst of a 17-day stretch of subfreezing temperatures where the snow just wouldn’t stop coming, and I had to rethink my whole position. I still stand by everything I said in both pieces, but it felt disingenuous not to acknowledge both sides of this coin. (The same goes for last week’s piece about why homelessness is bullshit and should not exist, and that it’s appropriate for the camping community to consider the relationship between those two things. Thank you to everyone who helped us raise over $1,000 to end homelessness in Chicago.)
Today, you can read Part 1, The Idealist. here. Sign up here to be notified.
Part 2 – The Realist
I spoke too soon. A foot of fluffy flakes fell on top of the feet that were already there. I have to disagree with me from Part 1. Snow creates tremendous anxiety. Until the last foot fell, I agreed entirely with Part 1 Lindsay. Last week, I spent a few days anxiously googling “ice dam” and trying to determine how much worry I should have over the coming thaw. If my house is a ship, I am the captain, steering it through an icy storm. I don’t want to take on any water.
When the snow was falling, the twentysomething guy next door was out around 11 p.m., snowblowing the sidewalk. When that was done, he started to shovel the steps down to the basement apartment. Exasperated and exhausted, he told my husband he’d never seen any snow like this in his life. I have. I was a kid though. I don’t know the gap between our ages, but if I had to guess, the last time I saw snow this high was before he was alive. I’d like to think this is in-line with “normal” because I saw it as a kid, but what I saw as a kid doesn’t count as normal.
On my deck, I have a concrete planter shaped like a skull. It sits about a foot tall and stares at me from the deck while I work. One day I watched the snow rise from just under its eye sockets, to well over it’s head. The snow kept coming with very little warning. I watched the railings of my deck disappear from the bottom up. I remembered one winter a few years ago when it snowed for what felt like a month straight, and never melted once. After a while the snow was higher on the ground than my old coupe was off it, which made it super difficult to get around. I’m grateful not to be driving anywhere right now. I haven’t seen my planter in a few weeks, though.
Wednesday there was a break in the weather. I thought that would be the best chance I’d get all week to run to the errands. An hour spent shoveling, sweating and huffing, and my car made it halfway out of the garage before getting stuck. Another 20 minutes of pushing and rocking, and it was back in. It was a short trip that took a long time and accomplished nothing. Thursday I tried to shovel my way to the trash cans, but the back gate was frozen in place.
Then, the icicles began to form. At first, they were a sort of magic I hadn’t seen in a long time. Now that I am a homeowner, they mean something else. A friend posted a picture of her glass block window, ice covering it from top to bottom, and spreading to her brickwork. Then one appeared on my siding. And another. I began furiously googling about ice dams. I anxiously checked every interior window and wall, looking for damp. I had my husband climb into the attic to verify the absence of moisture. I kept checking the dark corners of the basement. Each morning I woke up to another subfreezing day, with new, larger icicles hanging off my roof, from the soffits and the siding. It’s not inside, and I want it to stay that way. The snow on my back deck compacted itself, thanks to a few somewhat sunny days. I watched the snow on the railing for a few days as it warbled and wobbled, slowly collapsing on itself. The edges are now ragged, and growing their own icicles. They worry me less. Even my birdfeeder has its own tiny icicles hanging off its roof.
I keep checking on Texas, a place and people I have rarely bothered with. I am angry for them. I feel privileged to live in a region that is used to winter, because that means we are operating with a baseline level of knowledge that many Texans are not. I replaced all the batteries in all my combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors after reading one too many horror stories. A photo of skyscrapers celebrating Valentine’s Day against vast darkened neighborhood made clear who the haves and have nots are in Houston. I pull up the local power outage map for where I live and I frown, because they all occur in neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Where I live on the far North Side, I’m so unconcerned with power that I leave lights on all over the house and scroll mindlessly on my phone, while paying half attention to Netflix. The food in my fridge has not gone bad, except through my own neglect. Is this the system working like it was designed to?
The thaw came right when it said it would. Seventeen days below freezing. These long cold snaps used to be more common when the jet stream was strong, but now it’s an uncomfortable anomaly. I spent all weekend before the thaw fretting over the ice dams on my roof. Using three broom handles duct taped together and a coat hanger fashioned into a hook, I put old tights and long johns filled with calcium chloride onto the roof line. The YouTube videos I watched all suggested careful placement to create a channel was the best bet for clearing out the ice, but I was unwilling to get on a ladder. Imperfect application seemed to have gotten me somewhere. The front of the house has gotten the brunt of it. There’s a gutter that can’t be more than three feet long, but it is full of ice bergs. On Sunday I was okay with how things were moving on the sides of the house, but the front was not improving. A small ice rink formed on the steps. When the temp is above freezing, I can hear the water running inside the wall by my front door. The air hovering around freezing means the ice patch isn’t going anywhere any time soon. I named the ice Salt Goodman, AKA Slippin’ Jimmy. I throw ice melt on Salt Goodman at least twice a day. The heavy wet snow the forecast promised just turned into rain. Slippin’ Jimmy took over my whole front stoop and most of the sidewalks.
I just spotted a housefly. It found a sunny spot on the blue plastic of my bird feeder. I didn’t believe it at first because it’s still February. It hasn’t been unseasonably warm. It’s only been above freezing long enough to melt the icicles on the roofs. But it’s shiny carapace and jittery movement is unmistakable, that’s a house fly. They only live 28 days, I read. In colder climates they’ll often hibernate until temperatures warm up. The temperature has been steadily rising for the last two days or so, maybe this one just woke up early? This is a tough time to be an emergent pest. The crab apple tree outside my window is getting a little fuzzy on the ends of its branches. In a few weeks that fuzz will turn into blooms. I still think it’s going to be a late spring, but I feel better knowing that it’s coming. Today, the temperature hit forty degrees. The air in my nostrils is humid for the first time in months. I know we have weeks of winter still to go, but suddenly it feels like we’re past the worst of it.
