Summer in Albion Basin, looking westward toward Alta, Utah. Location currently under 154" of snow.
After 14 years in Utah, I still don't ski. I like my snow anyway. It clears the air. It is pretty, until the mailman tromps through it and messes it up. I like untrodden snow.
I grew up in southern California. Once every couple of years, we went to visit the snow. R grew up in Texas, where they had ice storms. An inch of snow can shut down Houston, but black ice is worse.
Our neighbor Millie jokes to this day that R and I spent our first December on our porch, snow shovels in hand, waiting for snow. We were excited, even icicles were a wonder. Finally it snowed and snowed.
After a few weeks, another neighbor, Vernon, could not stand watching the amateurs across the street anymore. An elderly, reserved gentleman, he took my husband aside in a completely uncharacteristic outburst of busybodiness, and gave him a snow shoveling lesson:
- Buy a plastic, not metal, shovel.
- Leave it to chill on the porch so won't snow won't stick to it. (In Houston it would be gone in an hour.)
- Don't walk on the snow before you shovel it. (This one must have pushed Vernon over the edge.)
It was a manly conversation; I think Vernon would have suffered in silence forever rather than speak so to another man's wife, even if we weren't married yet. But we were so ignorant, we didn't know what we didn't know. I learned once that the difference between ignorance and stupid is that the first implies a simple lack of information, which can be corrected. Stupid is irreparable.
I was thinking about Vernon today, ice-cold plastic shovel in hand. His wife passed away some years ago and he moved away. The mailman still messes up the snow, but he does deliver the mail in all weather. And 154" of snow at Albion will likely produce a glorious batch of wildflowers again this year.
Forecast is for snow, more snow, and then some snow. But tomorrow there is a break in the weather and I'm leaving for Arizona: Wickenburg, Phoenix, Florence. No snow there. I'm not stupid.
