“Did you look outside?” a friend asked me this morning.
Did I look outside? I’ve been trying to avoid it. Must I? I’ll think about it. Can I leave it until April? No.
Outside is like a scene from a Christmas card. Again. Come to think of it, it’s looked like that since Christmas. This morning all the violations of yesterday are gone. The heavy boot and snow shovel scars have vanished in the night’s snow. Clearly I’ll have to give that weather a talking to.
“Ok ok ok. I know we asked for a white Christmas and you did that and it was very nice but can you go away now? Go and snow on someone else for a change. What about all those poor snow-starved tourists down in Mexico. They must be just gasping for a few feet of the stuff!”
An icicle is dripping. I want to go out and tell it to get a move on, there are twelve feet sorry, inches of snow waiting to be thawed.
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
A snow drift around my pear tree.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Two blizzards more and a snow drift around my pear tree.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Three cold snaps, two blizzards more, and a snow drift around my pear tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Four chilly blasts, three cold snaps, two blizzards more, and a snow drift around my pear tree.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Five frozen pipes!
Four chilly blasts, three cold snaps, two blizzards more, and a snow drift around my pear tree.
You get the picture.
Here was my picture of today. Linger in warm, cosy bed with Mac and the coffeepot for as long as humanly possible. Didn’t I do everything else yesterday? All I have to do today is put on ten layers of clothes, trudge along my shovelled walkways to the water cisterns, get up a ladder with a bucket on a rope and haul water back to the house. The hard work is all done! I scraped, shovelled and chipped my way into the bins on Monday, scraped, shovelled and chipped my way into the cisterns on Tuesday and indulged in a little investigative plumbing yesterday just to pass the time of day. Which was fun but a bit like a PD James novel with no ending. Which is the guilty pipe? Ok guys, who did it? Several of them had good reasons for committing the icy crime. They had the motivation. They had the means. It’s just a question of eliminating the suspects one by one.
I eliminated them. I guess just because you can play the English concertina doesn’t necessarily mean you can fix the plumbing. Well who’da thought it?
The Blethering Ant 