My snow experiences

 

Maybe I should have stayed in California. I never saw snow until we went sledding in the Sierra Nevada when I was 15.

So moving east, I had a number of bad encounters with the unfamiliar winter weather:

1965: Why scrape ice off your windshield? In Pittsburgh, I just tossed a bucket of hot water on it. Oh! It cracks? I never thought of that!

1966: I had the bright idea to drive from Pittsburgh to my new job in Portland, Oregon, in March. I got past Chicago and Minneapolis OK, but I wanted to look at Mount Rushmore. When I saw a snowflake fall on George Washington’s eye, it was too late. My U-Haul became unhitched, and I fell on ice while I put it back and broke a rib or two.

1975: I broke another rib at Aspen, Colo., when a cross-country guide took us down an icy road that turned to pavement and I fell. Oddly, that was my only ski injury ever. I went downhill skiing several hundred times and was never hurt.

1978: The President’s Day storm dropped 18 inches of snow in Arlington the day after a big party I held at my house with few visitors. I lived off the leftover chili a friend made for a week.

1987 (Nov. 11): The new company I worked for moved to Vienna, VA, from Boise, Idaho, and managers were surprised to see a foot of snow in Virginia on Veterans’ Day. No snow day for us! The boss picked us all up in his Range Rover to go to work.

2016: During a famous blizzard, my back went out the first time I dug a shovelful of snow. Pickett, who took over, vowed to move us out of our house into an apartment. We did, but we had little snow the five years we lived there.

2026: I became hysterical in Cluster Springs over a threatened snowstorm while Pickett was gone. Fortunately, the storm was a bust and I shouldn’t have worried so much. Where was Pickett? She fled to California, of course.

At least, in snow you often get pretty scenery. Then why, in about 65 years away from the Golden State, did I see only about three white Christmases?