I Love Snow

The poet Shelley (you know, the Blythe Spirit guy) said:

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost.

I also love snow, but maybe not so much of it.

When I was in grammar school, I was required to memorize several poems. Unfortunately, I was only able to remember the first few lines of each, try as I might.

(The only feat of memorization that I accomplished was the books of the Bible, when I was in a Baptist Sunday School. However, when it came time to demonstrate my prowess, I got stage-fright and couldn't even start to talk.)

One of the bits of poem that I was able to memorize was from James Russell Lowell's poem:

The First Snow-Fall.

The snow had begun in the gloaming
And busily all the night,
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

The rest of the poem was kind of sad, so I was not eager to memorize it. This sadness surprized me, because Mr. Lowell was the only one of the famous Massachusetts 19th Century poets who normally did humorous and satirical work.

(By the way, Mr. Lowell was the author of the influential Biglow papers.. the first series of which lambasted the Mexican War.. the second series of which was concerned with the Civil War.)

I was interested in this word "gloaming" = dusk. I found that the word probably was derived from Middle English "gloming", from "glom" meaning "dusk". The words "gloom" and "gloomy" come from these roots.

Remember: "Roaming through the gloaming, with my sweetheart by my side." I think this was a line from a Scottish song popularized by Sir Harry Lauder.

Well, the TV announcer says that Eldersburg, Maryland has now received over 20" of snow today.. on top of the 28" they received a couple of days ago. (That's four feet of snow in one week, folks.. more than at Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.) Eldersburg is about 10 miles away from where we are.. and we probably have received as much as they have.

The 40 mph wind gusts are still heaping drifts around our house.. in addition, a Bobcat with a snow blower keeps going by and blowing snow all over the drifts.

Things like mailboxes and fire hydrants disappeared from sight long ago. The poor birds are flying around looking for food and we have cabin fever, but there is no way we could venture out in this blizzard.

The snow is supposed to stop in three hours, but the winds will keep it drifting until tomorrow morning when the sun will miraculously appear to warm us up a bit and melt all of the icicles.

If I were younger, I would now be out shoveling snow. I loved to do that, especially when I was a teenager. On a day after a big snow storm, I could sometimes make $10 shoveling people out. (Ten dollars was big money when I was a kid.)

Now, I live in a "continuing care community" and they don't advise any of us old dudes to shovel snow. At 3 AM this morning, I heard some Spanish, turned on my porch light, and discovered an older man shoveling my porch. He did a good job, but by 8 AM, we were snowed in again. A group of guys came by around ten AM and shoveled the porch again. The snow quickly piled up again and I guess they gave up because the porch snow is now shoulder-high. Maybe they'll come back in the early morning when the snow and blowing stops.

If I'm lucky, they will shovel out my driveway. However, there will still be six feet of snow on top of my car and I'll have to get that put somewhere. I am still young enough to be able to do physical things, but some of my neighbors are quite elderly. I hope they don't try to shovel anything because a heart is a terrible thing to lose.

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