Despite This We Stay for January 12, 1202

by Carol Dunn
HUERFANO — Ok, I held off writing about this for two years because it seems so obvious. Only a few really disturbed people truly love winter. And we in Colorado don’t usually have a lot to complain about when it comes to winter, at least not compared to the East Coast. For instance, one Pennsylvania reader sent me a message about clearing his driveway of 36 inches of snow with his Rubbermaid model 1127 dustpan when his truck with the shovel inside got buried by a snow drift. We’ve only had a few snows that caused our car to high-center. And I don’t think a dustpan would have helped us all that much (although it might have done just as well as the spade shovel, since that’s all we could find when the snow buried our snow shovel).
Ever notice that some of the coldest winter weather happens before the first day of winter? I am just about up-to-here with the cold weather already. No, we haven’t been drifted in this winter – yet. No, we haven’t had 17 feet of snow. But it’s STILL cold. I’m willing to go along with a little cold weather (meaning I don’t whine about it constantly), but this is asking a bit much.
We Huerfanos are just not used to these frigid temps for months at a time. If we liked that sort of thing, we’d live in a frozen wasteland like Antarctica or Fargo. I’ll admit, we’re spoiled. We’re used to new snow melting in a day or two, but it ain’t happening this year. We actually have ICE at our farm. Lots of ice. Not the pretty stuff that you skate on, but the ugly, lumpy, crunchy stuff that makes you fall on your butt. Sure, when you live in the snow belt, you expect to have the same old dirty, grimy snow piled up ten feet high in grocery store parking lots until July. But not here. We have “elite” winter weather in Colorado, and I wish it would go back to acting that way. It’s downright embarrassing to admit to relatives that there is STILL snow on the ground (after you have bragged time and again at family reunions about how “it snows one day and it’s gone the next day”). And no, you can’t lie, because they can look up your farm on Google Earth and they can SEE the snow in your front yard.
In addition to the ice, the old, grimy snow is now crusty and rotten. It trips you. It blinds you. It makes your cat mad. To add insult to injury, the snow that won’t go away reflects the sunlight back to the sun. Hey! We need that heat more than the sun does. Truly, we do.