I looked at the weather forecast and was surprised to see the low low percentage chance for snow for the next week..maybe. We have had a Winter here even by PA folk estimates as we’ve had one snow event after another. Now it is piled up along the streets and since Ive not been driving my car, ala pandemic where would I go, my car has a blanket of white on and around it. (I keep telling it I will indeed free it someday.). The melt though is welcomed. It is good not to be hit by really cold when you walk out.
I remember the Melt in Utah where we’d had a bunch of snow and then the beautiful awesome dominating blue skies would come out in the afternoon. It was always refreshing, blinding a little, but refreshing. The sunlight made the really cold temperatures there seem not so extreme.
The first year we moved there in October we found out what UT mountain cold was all about as we had moved from TX and weren’t prepared with coats or boots or all necessary. I felt like I had a direct line to Eddie Bauer. Hi Eddie Bauer, it’s Bobbie…ya send me more warm stuff. I remember having two great flannel shirt dresses that I wore out. Eddie Bauer became a good supplier for the whole family.
The kids and I had moved out mid September to get them settled in school and us settled in our house till John came out. We had rented one house but it sold rather than rented. We were in a much smaller house that was a house of boxes. We had settled the kids rooms but the den was a maze of boxes with tables on them like ‘lenenes’. old lamp, (antique fragile lamp) and many mystery boxes.
The neighbor girls would come over and help us unpack. For them it was like a treasure find. At one point they unwrapped a big ball of paper and in it found something unknown. A leaf? Dried flat little thing. They showed Betsy and she said MY FISH. She’d had one of those solitary fighting fish that had disappeared months before. Apparently it had jumped out of the bowl and landed behind the bookshelf. Mystery solved. We still laugh when we remember.
What surprised me most I think about the Utah melt was that we could be in the single digits for weeks then we had the melt. Once the first melt happened the rest of the winter was a quick snow and melt. We didn’t have the foot or two that snowed and remained. Nothing stopped in Utah for the snow. They were prepared for the winters. The streets would be plowed and everything open. Only once in 12 years did we have a snow day caused by a blizzard that came in at 4am and they determined they could get people out, busses to schools, but when the blizzard continued getting the kids home was another story.
The first January we were there we had a particularly cold phase. I remember waking and finding out the temperature, minus 22, and telling John the temperature and asking him if he thought the cars would start because they were still having school. I didn’t want to get the kids up if we couldn’t go anywhere. I am not sure that John even opened his eyes but he said, no, they won’t start and we both went back to bed.
That year for 20 days in a row it didn’t get UP to zero. That was cold. We made adjustments for the cars and got them working and went on about the day. Everything freezes really fast. When it ‘warmed’ up we sent to Ice-skate in the park. The city would flood two baseball fields and they rented skates for $2.00. Everyone could skate. My rule became it had to be 10 or you would get so cold after 10 minutes you almost always had to go home. But between 10-18 it was perfect. The evenings skating were so much fun. The lights and the sky and the whole atmosphere. Most years we had several days of skating but toward 2000 we had several winters where it didn’t get cold enough.
Ok, the melts. Maybe that’s what we all need right now, a case of the Melts. Things have been set down, it seems like they won’t ever change, and then they do. Then things that seem hard and certain one way get softer and more pliable. We learn. Let’s learn.
Melting…away any hardness of heart.
God abide, bobbie giltz mcgarey
The Spirit Will Tell You 