Snow Day

“‘Snow in April is abominable,’ said Anne. ‘Like a slap in the face when you expected a kiss.’”

— L.M. Montgomery

So, the plan for today had been for me to be somewhere over southern Pennsylvania right now, or maybe West Virginia, on my way to Florida for a deposition tomorrow. Instead, here I am at the desk at Tara, musing on beautiful skies this morning that do not give the slightest adumbration of the badness on the way.

My first eyeful of the impending mess came last night, when I had barely sat down from our flight home from Massachusetts and began flight planning for today's journey to KECP. The weather looked pretty bad to the south, a solid rash of red, yellow, and green arcing from the Georgia coast northwestward toward Minnesota, where it turned to snow. I went to bed hoping things would get better, but awoke to find the situation had deteriorated even further. Peg drove me to the airport on a 21 degree morning here, with clear skies all around, and I sat in the crew lounge on the phone with flight service trying to come up with a plan that would allow me to pick through this mess and arrive in Panama City sometime tonight.

How about flying to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, then down the coast until I got south of the system and could fly west to the panhandle? No sir, it's all building in that direction--when you get to Elizabeth City, you can plan on spending the night.

Okay, how about flying over towards Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, then down through Tennessee? Well, over there you have ice, lots of ice, and it extends from near the surface up to 26,000 feet. Can you climb over it?

So we settled on trying this again tomorrow, and I caught an Uber back from the airport to Tara. The driver was a nice, middle-aged Ichabod Crane type, who obviously didn't realize his passenger was deaf as a post while he mumbled something about lots of different forecasts regarding snow accumulation when the storm hits here later today.

Mumble mumble mumble an inch mumble mumble now three inches mumble mumble mumble maybe six.

The mask didn't help. I just smiled and nodded, then looked on my phone for the latest forecast. Maybe an inch-and-a-half by the morning. I can try again then.

Now I find myself with a snow day on a clear blue morning in Corning. What to do with this surfeit of time?

Well, the cats were happy to see me walk-up, as Slane broke into his starvation lament on the lawn and Dean ran manically back and forth down the hall when I walked in.

Having cemented my status as the cats' best friend, I next fixed Peg's flagpole and put her "Abide No Hatred" flag back out there so the Trumpers would know whom to threaten.

Then I turned to the poor espresso machine, which has waited patiently for months as its negligent owners failed to clean it. Well, it's clean now, with lots of interesting black gunky stuff that poured out in the process. A small wonder the machine still worked at all.

Now here I am pondering whether there are any other chores I've failed to complete over these incredibly busy few weeks. And of course there are still mounds of work staring me in the face--it's not like I've created an extra day so much as postponed that unproductive day in the air by 24 hours.

And that work lay mostly untouched over the last couple days, because this past weekend was a blast and a blur.

As soon as Peg left work on Friday, we jumped into the Columbia and flew to KLWM (Lawrence, Mass) to spend Easter with the Reeve/Stickley tribe in Andover and Winchester. The flight east was bumpy but blazing fast due to tailwinds, and we were on the deck there in an hour-and-ten. That same trip is over six hours in the truck.

Friday night we all packed around the table in Issac and Olivia's living room for take-out Indian food, because the dining room is part of the mass construction zone that is their home right now. It'll be cool when it's finished, but for now the renovation meant six adults sharing one shower while we stayed there.

Saturday we borrowed the car and went in search of a restaurant and bar owned by the brother-in-law of one of Peg's colleagues at Guthrie. Our confidence in Google Maps was rattled by the experience, as delivering us to the south end of Chelsea proved too much for its feeble sense of direction. First we drove around the arena where the Bruins play--twice. And the Bruins were playing that day, so that part of downtown was a circus of black and yellow clad fans and traffic. Then we drove past Logan Airport a couple times because, well, why not? At some point we arrived in East Boston, which we learned from the only non-hispanic person living there is called simply "Eastie" by the locals. Finally we bumbled north to a bridge across a little fishing boat basin and--just like that--we were in Chelsea.

The restaurant was more of a sports bar, with crowds of folks drinking the establishment's famous Mimosa flights and watching basketball. Somehow at this point Jesus entered the conversation, and Peg decided we would go to church on Easter Sunday and, therefore, needed to buy clothes.

So off we went to Assembly Row, a big outdoor shopping mall just a couple miles down the road. The place was packed on a beautiful but windy day, and we elbowed our way through the purchase of a couple articles of clothing we thought suitable for the biggest church day of the year. I was exhausted from the day's meander, but we had one more stop to make because P had promised to fix supper for everyone, and had decided the main course would be fish.

Imagine our surprise when we walked into Whole Foods and found two beautiful red snapper staring googly-eyed back up at us. We decided it was a sign from above when the fishmonger told us they'd been shipped up from Panama City, meaning they almost certainly came from Tarpon Docks. Of course, the price is a little higher after such a long flight north.

Once back at the house, Peg got to work in the kitchen while Issac and Olivia hauled loads of rock and dug a deeper dog pond as part of the apparently endless exercise of fixing their lovely yard.

I sat and read the paper.

The fish was wonderful. Peg explained to all that you could tell the two big snapper were fresh by the eyes. I've never been much of a connoisseur of things with the head still on, and simply took her word for it.

The next day we made it to church at Christ Church Andover, in a beautiful sanctuary built in the 1880s. We marveled at the ease of parking, and number of empty spots in the pews. Then the rector ascended for a meandering, content-less sermon, and we began to understand the sparse attendance. But the music was amazing, with a trumpeter as good as I've ever heard at an Easter Service. So there's that.

Next up was supper at the Reeves, always a delightful affair with twenty-plus folks of pretty much every generation, dogs, golf on TV. We didn't do many of these large family gatherings when I was a pup, and I always look forward to our time there. So does Peg, because there's inevitably an abundance of good champagne.

We took our leave early, right after the dishes were cleared, so Issac could race us back to the airport for the flight home. It snowed on me during the preflight, but things cleared out by the time we took off. It was slow going to the west with those formerly helpful winds now blasting in our face, but the vistas were spectacular over the Hudson and the Catskills.

And now here I am, watching the skies turn silver with a high cirrus that along with a suddenly whipping wind forebodes what's coming. Time to take advantage of this respite and get a little work done before P gets home.