Twice in about a week I've realized that the dogs and I are the only living creatures out on the streets of our little city, and I have found that quite revealing. While I'm starting to get the message, I'm not too sure I like what it says.
This past weekend, after I returned from another full week at my small college on the hill, the dogs and I went out for our morning walk although the winds outside were gusting at 50 mph. I had to dress up like the people you see in those documentaries about the polar station located in a glacier in the Antarctic. Not only was I wearing several thermal layers and my trusty minus-20-degrees long parka, the one a friend described as my "personal floating device," but every inch of my body, except my eyes, was covered.
Of course, for those of us who wear glasses, that means that my vision was constantly getting fogged up, which is inordinately annoying when you're trying to avoid running into a flying trash can, or struggling against being whisked away by a wind gust, like Dorothy out of Kansas, dogs and all.
As I gave the dogs the abridged version of our morning walk, I noticed that there was not another human (or animal) soul on the streets. Mad dogs and Englishmen, the 1930s song said about who would step out into the tropical noontime sun. Well, here in Ohio I guess it's Viejo dogs and Puerto Ricans, when it comes to who goes out in near-hurricane-strength winds buffeting our little city.
Today, I had pretty much the same eerie feeling that I was walking the dogs through a ghost town as we found ourselves, once more, the only ones on the streets, braving the five inches of snow on the ground, and the blizzard-like conditions. Once more, I was decked out to the nines in winter gear, like I was ready to scale Everest sans the Sherpa to guide me.
(BTW, does it bother anyone else that it was a white New Zealander, the recently deceased Edmund Hillary, who got most of the fame for scaling Everest first in 1953, although he acknowledged -- at least in an NPR interview I heard recently -- that it was Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa from India, who actually got there first?)
This isn't Everest, by any means (¡gracias a Dios!) but a snow storm, the worst one yet this winter in Ohio, struck last night and it hasn't stopped snowing yet. When all is said and done, we might be buried under more than eight inches of snow, and that's down here, in the city. I don't even want to think what the streets and fields around the little apartment in my small college on the hill look like today. I'm glad I was here in the warmer south, so to speak, and that my car is safe and dry in our garage, rather than literally buried in snow at the apartment parking lot.
As we trudged through the unplowed and fast accumulating snow, Rusty was positively puppy-like as he bounded and appeared to want to frolic in the snow. Geni, good Puerto Rican sata that she is, kept looking up at me, wanting to gauge how much longer she had to endure this suplicio. Needless to say, this was another abridged walk.
By the time we were back at our door, Geni looked like she was an iced dog-shaped cookie. From the tip of her nose to the end of her freakish-looking tail (multicolored and misshaped as it is), she was covered in white, powdery snow. Rusty, clearly a smarter breed of sato, had shaken off the snow several times and was hardly incommoded.
It's still snowing out there and it's supposedly going to turn into a wintry mix, with snow showers and icy rain later today. That's why I've decided to stay right here in my warm and cozy home, rather than brave the elements. That element-braving thing, that's one of those things I do only for the dogs.
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