Let it SNOW (I Guess)

It is interesting here in Maine that some winters we have so little snow that there is very little need to plow or shovel out our roads. At other times, it is hard to keep up and difficult to find a place to push all of the snow and leave room enough to park a vehicle.

This picture was taken, I believe, in March of 2008 in front of Grammie Ruth's home on the Station Road in Littleton. This is the home where her grandson (my nephew) Christopher Cain and his wife Lisa now live with their children. We arrived at the home around midnight and this is a flash picture showing Grampie Wayne trying to dig his way through the snow banks to the front door.

Grammie was at the Vacationland Estates in Island Falls with Aunt Carla and Uncle Phid. It was our idea to go to the house, turn on the furnace, and have everything nice and cozy for when she would arrive home the next day. We were SO happy we had a shovel on the back of our pickup -- my contribution was to hand-carve out little bits of snow with a plastic casserole dish. We had the motion-sensing light and the light from our pickup. It took awhile, but we got inside, turned the furnace up, and got immediately into bed under a mound of blankets. What a night that was!!

A few years ago I wrote in a journal -- still unfinished-- for our children (your parents) about other winter memories:Well, the worst winter storm-snow wise- that I can recall was in 1968 when Kevin was a newborn. The worst storm - utilities wise - was the Ice Storm of 1998 when some were out of power for weeks.

Let’s talk about 1968, though. Your Dad called me from work that afternoon and asked what we needed from the store. I told him to wait until morning, to just come home because it was "bad" out there. In Machias, if you went to the grocery store, it meant driving up a hill, no matter which way you traveled and I didn’t want him to get "stuck" downtown. We actually needed everything. The next morning, our car was not visible -- it was buried. We could see only the radio antenna sticking up through the snow. Dad had to go out through the livingroom window because there was so much snow drifted in front of the door.

We were snowed in for 3 days -- finally, they used a bulldozer to clear us out. By that time we had run out of food. Only Kevin was eating well because he was nursing from Mommy. We had phone service, so Dad arranged for a friend to pick him up at the end of our road and he waded the half-mile through very deep snow. His friend took him to the store and found a place where he could borrow a toboggan to haul the groceries on. He also borrowed snowshoes. It was getting dark by the time he got home. But before the groceries were put away, the lights of the bulldozer were seen! That storm left drifts to the roof of the hospital and boys from the high school volunteered to help shovel out.

How about comments from some of you about the Ice Storm of 1998? That was a not-so-fun adventure!