Mother Nature had yet another unpleasant surprise up her sleeve. At least it wasn’t what she originally planned- between 10 and 13 inches of new snow, on top of the mountain of snow already with us. As the weekend progressed, the temps rose enough that almost all of the precipitation Saturday night and Sunday came down as rain or freezing rain. . . with scarcely a single snowflake at least in our neck of the woods. Whew, we thought to ourselves- but that Whew was a bit premature. We woke up to very wet and slippery conditions with our driveway was a solid sheet of ice and the street right in front of our house was a veritable lake because the storm sewers were completely buried by 7 and a half feet of snow deposited there by the snow plows. We teetered and tottered our way to church for first service; the senior choir was singing and Kathy was assisting minister, so skipping was not an option. (It almost never is.) But as soon as first service was over, I was in my car and back home to see what forty five minutes of shoveling might do to eliminate our lake. (Speaking of lakes, there was one in the choir room at church, thanks to a leak in the roof/ ceiling. I think our capital campaign for facility renovation is underway a bit after the fact.) But as I got home, just behind Kathy, there was another problem perhaps even more serious with which to contend- – – the expulsion pipe connected to the outflow of our sump pump (sp?) came loose, so our sump pump was dumping its water right alongside the foundation of the house, where it just went right back into the reservoir to be expelled again, causing the thing to run almost without pause. I tried reattaching the pipe, but there was so much water being expelled each time that the pipe would just explode off of it all over again. In fact, the pipe would go flying off even before the water got to it- blown off by the air pressure of the rapidly moving water. And I learned the hard way that holding the pipe in place didn’t work either- not with that kind of water pressure- and I ended up with two pairs of winter gloves completely soaked for my trouble. So kathy was dispatched to Home Depot to get some more piping while I resumed the shoveling project out in the street- and praying that the good folks of second service would survive without any special music. And as I began trying to shovel that packed down, cement-like snow, I felt like I was living through a chapter from the unpublished Second Book of Job. . . the one in which Job lives through the worst Wisconsin winter on record and wishes for the days when all he had to worry about was maggots in his breakfast.
Anyway, en route to Home Depot, Kathy realized in her wisdom that – in the words of Abraham Lincoln – the situation was piled high with difficulty. So she called our good friend Kurt Oian, the tech director at the Racine Theater Guild, the guy who built us our basement shelves, who helped us clean out and organize our garage . . . and the guy who has this amazing capacity to tackle every trouble with this hard- to-resist optimism. That was what Kathy and I needed this morning, more than anything- we needed to believe that we were going to survive the day. We also needed someone smarter than either of us when it comes to these kind of problems- and Kurt, being the amazing friend that he is, dropped what he was doing and came on over to look over the problem and then called Kathy to tell her exactly what to order and how much. And until Kathy arrived, Kurt joined me in clearing our driveway of its sheet of ice, courtesy of the magnificent old shovel which once belonged to Grandpa Gall. I have no idea what this thing is made of, but its substantial enough to be categorized as a deadly weapon – with a blade that seems like it’s made of iron, and with an incredibly sharp blade that Kurt could get to cut right down to the pavement . . . plus one of those incredibly sturdy, substantial wooden handles that tells you that this is a real tool – not some toy.
Eventually kathy returned with the piping and I continued the shoveling while those two got the sump pump reconnected. And about an hour after Kathy called the Mount Pleasant streets department and explained our problem to them, there were two trucks in front of our house – one of which was one of the biggest snow plows I’ve ever seen. And after about 90 seconds, they had cleared the snow away from one of the drains – something which would have taken Kurt and me weeks to do. (I’m actually not exaggerating, since the snow was so incredibly heavy, both Kurt and I would have been in the hospital with strokes and / or heart attacks.) It was actually so icy on the street that the wheels of the snow plow occasionally spun, but he never actually got stuck and by the time he was done we had a cleared off grate and a fighting chance of getting rid of our lake.
And by the end of our session with Kurt, we realized all over again that a friend like Kurt is worth ten times his weight in gold. . . not only for his generosity but also for the good cheer of that generosity. It’s as though Kurt doesn’t know any other way to live. Neither did Grandpa Gall, from what I have heard, so it seems only fitting that he was with us today in the guise of his magnificent shovel – and that our good and generous friend Kurt was wielding that shovel with vigor and confidence. Kurt and Grandpa Gall’s shovel- together, they actually made the misery inflicted by Mother Nature seem entirely manageable and, believe it or not, almost fun.
Almost.
pictured: Our friend Kurt, hard at work with Grandpa Gall’s shovel in hand.