Susan's Scribblings the Blog

It snowed the other day. It snowed a lot. I still had to go to work, because one of the strangest aspects of my life has been that I have always taken on jobs which require my presence on holidays and in bad weather. Until you have had somebody above you demanding your presence in the workplace at the risk of losing your head to a dull guillotine, you can’t imagine what it can be like. In snow everybody sleeps in, except those who are called to serve or be served (on a platter to Salome).

Shovel and scraper in hand, I had to spend 40 minutes, at six in the morning, removing the town snow plow’s detritus from in front of my driveway, clear off my car and drive to work out-of-state. Fortunately my job has the foresight to issue me a driving waiver so I can still be seen by patrolling police cars as an idiot on the road in a state of emergency in a mid-sized Chevrolet. They must just shake their heads in amazement, because I don’t get pulled over so they can ask to see who gave me permission to drive on bad snow days. My driving waiver sits pristinely in my wallet just like my New Jersey paper driver’s license of old (those of us old Jersey folk remember the squarish, easy to reproduce fake ones version of driver ID we had before they gave in and started issuing plastic ones), which got me out of a ticket once because the officer remarked how clean it was, meaning that I was a safe enough driver to never have had to pull it out to show anybody.

Now it’s a few days after the bad weather, and we have to deal with melting and refreezing water and wheel well droppings of black slushy goop left by other cars. My car looks like a graffiti artist went to town with his idea of a splatter painting. The car wash closed early, so everybody’s vehicle looks terrible, strewn with road salt debris. All the cars look terrible, and our parking at the supermarkets is just as terrible. Without lines, and in need of milk and bread, we just take our best guess and just stay far enough from the other person’s door to open our own and trudge inside.

I haven’t seen many snow sculptures during snowstorms lately. Either that art form has passed into antiquity, or people just don’t want to build things out of discolored snow from wheel well droppings.