The Groundhog Day Blizzard

February 1, 2011, a Tuesday night, proved to be a testament to the power of prayer and a mouth that should have been washed out with soap. We were expecting to get hit with what the meteorologists were calling blizzard conditions starting at around 3:00 p.m. CST. I put my feelers out to my husband (at the farm) and to my sister in Dodgeville that once they saw the snow start to come down, they should call or email me right away because at that point I would head for the hills. My sister Kristi emailed me around 3:30 to say it had just started snowing in Dodgeville. Bob waited until 3:45 to say it has started, so you better head home now. He said the snow wasn’t coming down that hard, it was just that the wind was picking up and getting stronger by the moment.

So by the time I finished up a few things at the office, I finally headed out the door about 4:30. Yep, should have probably gotten on the road a little sooner, but whether I am trying to get out the door in the morning to head to work, or get out the door at night from work to head home, I am always trying to get one more thing done. Hence, the case again. The winds almost seemed like they were whipping in from the East (I suppose more of a Northeasterly wind) because everything was drifting on the east side of the road. The whiteout conditions were the worst. I couldn’t see anything except for a few feet in front of me; okay, maybe more like yards, but seemed like feet! I had my headset on and, as usual, was talking to him all the way home. My end of the conversation was mostly limited to two or three word expletives like “Holy Sh_t” or “Oh My God” because each mile down the road seemed to bring a new adventure. These are the types of adventures I don’t really care for.

My 35-mile ride home seemed to take forever. What normally would have taken me 45 minutes turned into around two hours. Not your scenic Sunday drive, that’s for sure! In essence, if I really want to give myself a little credit, I would say that I did leave just in time. Some of the roads were starting to plug up from the drifts across the road. And since my trusty four-wheel drive Durango is no longer in service, my front-wheel drive Grand Prix had to learn to buck a few drifts she wished she hadn’t seen or will ever see again. My biggest fears along the way were meeting cars. Those that I would meet would be heading North, as I was heading South. Their lane was the one that was completely drifted in, heading into my lane. When the whiteout conditions were happening, the approaching car couldn’t see me and if they were trying to avoid the drifts in their lane and were driving in mine, it does not bode well for them or me. Luckily, once I got off the four-lane highway and was on the two-lane roads, I met very few cars; only two, in fact.

Once I got into town, I quickly ran into the store to pick up a few extra staples that I thought I might be running low on because we had already planned that I wouldn’t be at work the next day. I knew that the last four miles out to the farm might prove to be the worst, but heck at least I had milk with me! I can say for certainty, though, that once I got to my driveway – and even though Bob hadn’t plowed it for me yet – it was a sight I had been looking for in the past two hours and could have gotten out and kissed the ground underneath, except I would have had to dig down quite a bit to find it. The milk truck had just pulled in so I did have some tracks to follow. When I pulled up to the house, Bob was just getting ready to head down the driveway to plow for me, just a tad too late, but that’s okay as long as I had the milk truck tracks.

The name for our little snowfall – The Groundhog Day Blizzard. The snow continued into the night and got worse with high winds meddling a little, too. I haven’t seen snow and blizzards like this since I was a kid. At the farm we received about eight inches of snow Tuesday. Then Tuesday night into Wednesday, we got socked with 18 inches more. We now have mounds, or more appropriately, hills of snow piled higher than our tractor with the cab on it. Now these were the types of snow hills we liked to play on when we were kids. This snow has stuck with us for a couple weeks with below zero temps and below zero wind chills. (The picture above is of the farm after we started digging out on Groundhog Day).

It has definitely been a rough Winter, but the one good thing is that Jimmy The Groundhog didn’t see his shadow. Heck, for that matter, Jimmy probably couldn’t get out of his hole in the ground. This means, of course, that we will have an early Spring. Now I don’t care if Jimmy’s prediction percentage is good, bad or in between. When you have had a long, rough Winter, any little slip of hope that Spring will be just right around the corner is good enough for me. So if Jimmy wanted to come out of his hole, cross his fingers behind his back and tell me that Spring is on the doorstep, I’m a believer. Hope is one thing that no person (or animal) should take away from another. Just look what Jimmy has done for the economy – now that I think Spring is coming rapidly, I’ve been busy ordering plants. I’ve made new plans for what I am going to do outside in the yard. See, Jimmy has got the rhythm of what the country really needs. Hope!

Now here we are the day after Valentine’s Day, and I am happy as a lark. The weather is in the 40's (we even had highs in the 50's on Sunday), it is staying light longer at night (my car lights don’t even come on now until I am a couple miles from work) and the Winter Blues are starting to melt away. Speaking of melting away, even this huge dump of snow is melting away. The snow banks along the way home, where there was sometimes only one lane to drive in, are now to the point where you can actually meet a car and not have to worry about who is going to end up in the snowbank.

The birds are out and about, too; some never having left this Winter – which is a reminder that I need to get out to check my bird feeders. The birds have made quite an impact on what I had put out there so far this year, so I need to try to stay ahead of them. After all, if they wanted to suffer through Old Man Winter’s bad mood swings with me, I had better give them a good feast as a reward.

Yes, I’m looking forward to Spring, and it can’t come soon enough. And, if Mother Nature and Old Man Winter are still crotchety and want to throw one or two more snowfalls at me, I can suffer through it, too, just like the birds have. After all, hope has different names like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and in the dead of Winter, hope is called Jimmy The Groundhog.