Yep, It is Going to Snow...Again

Everyone is talking about the snow these days and it is hard not to.  The last storm taxed our resources and our patience quite a bit.  Our road--normally about a lane and a half wide--is down to one lane.  Faced with the challenge of getting their precious charges to nursery school, however, suburbanites with their SUV's have driven up over the snowbanks on either side.  Now it is concave.  It is our own personal half-pipe.  Also, presented with the shortage of paid snow-days, the school system is going to try to race ahead of the storm and get the schools open today.  It is a tough call that might have gone the other way in December or early January.  Now there are only 1.5 snow days left for the year.  The snow is supposed to keep falling until Thursday morning...

Regular readers will know that I am making peace with winter as best I can.  It has always been a rocky relationship.  Winter makes us sleepy.   More specifically, it makes us want to curl up in bed with a jar of cookies and a box of decongestants praying for a glimpse of the sun.  Even as a child in Maine, nestled among the happy memories of sledding and the snow forts are more problematic ones, like fetching wood in the freezing cold in order to stoke the fabulously dangerous stove that burnt my fingers and made some rooms ridiculously hot while leaving others untouched.  I wore a hat to bed well into my adulthood.  I still do when the parsonage furnace breaks.  I still remember my youngest sister breaking into tears one late February morning in Cumberland County because the clouds had gathered above us for the tenth day in a row.  In addition, I somehow list among my happiest moments a Palm Sunday where my wife and I sat in the window of the Bagel Shop in Bangor watching the rain wash the last snow of a very bad winter into the Kenduskeag canal.  It may be the reason for my deep and abiding love for lox and capers.

That having been said, I am in relatively good spirits.  I am on sabbatical, after all.  Even being yelled at by an old lady this weekend for "messing up the trail for everyone else" while cross-country skiing was only momentarily humiliating.  I like snow shoes better anyway.  This storm means great snowshoeing for a few days.  I will happily take them...and I will bring Norm.

In fact, my problems with the snow reside mostly in two categories.  The first is the clearly taxed infrastructure.  This snow is stretching the resources of our town, its institutions, and its people.  That worries me.  On an interpersonal level as a pastor, I am worried about the stress levels of my community as these resources get even more stretched.  As a parsonage tenant, I am worried about what will happen when the snow melts.  Last year the town sewer backed up and flooded my neighborhood with untreated waste...twice.  When I say flooded, by the way.  I am speaking of actual feet of standing water (and other things) on our lawns and in our basements.  The sewer pipe belongs to the state.  There is no reason to believe that it will not happen again this year.  Of course, I am philosophical.  As I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, we are not meant to live this way.  It requires too much of the earth.  But, then, there is the clean-up...

The other category is education.  Every time a snow day is called, I am put in the position of figuring out exactly how much I can ask Norm to do with his brothers home.  It is messing up lesson plans and putting us behind.  A brief chat with other homeschool parents at the MFA drop off last week indicated that many of them just ignore snow days and move right along with their plans.  Certainly homeschool programs do not cancel as often.  However, it is a hard thing to make a kid study when you have a mixed family of school and home-school kids.  At this rate, Norm Academy will be going well into August.

Ah well,  what can one do?  I have cookies and decongestants...and a shovel so I am ready.  Here are a couple links to earlier "snow-posts" that are a bit more cheerful here and here.  That second one is for the homeschoolers.

Also, the Atheneaum is opening today!  I won't be there.  I will be shovelling.  Then I will be reading the books I inadvertently saved from the flood.   However, if you want to help with the clean-up, you can always contribute here.  Here is a link to the original post about the Athenaeum.  Might as well read all this stuff....you aren't going anywhere.

Update:  I should note that the title is now officially misleading.  It is snowing now...hard.  Also, the town decided to burn the remaining half snow-day and the kids are on their way home...