Sally Breslin: My Life: AND STILL, I WON'T MOVE TO FLORIDA!

I really do enjoy the winter. Not only is the cold air refreshing, the snow also covers up my ugly dog-ruined yard and makes it look white and fresh. Even better, there also are no annoying, blood-sucking or stinging insects to contend with.

But the one thing I don’t like about winter is...ice.

Don’t get me wrong, when I was a kid, I loved, even was obsessed with ice, because of ice-skating. In fact, during the winter months I practically slept in my ice skates, I went skating so often. But now that I am of a more “advanced” age, I associate the word “ice” with compound fractures, and cars becoming intimate with trees.

About a week ago, my area had a snowstorm that dumped a little over four inches of snow …followed by about a foot of rain (or so it seemed), and then, the worst possible thing after rain…a deep freeze. Suddenly I understood why the dinosaurs had become extinct during the Ice Age.

Before the deep-freeze hit, and right after the rain, I went out to my garage – and ended up with my feet in water. I dragged out my wet/dry shop-vac and started sucking up the water from the concrete floor. After emptying the vac’s container, which felt as if it weighed about 200 lbs., five times and watching the water still running in underneath the garage door, I gave up. I decided that shoveling a path to my front porch was more important…before it froze.

All I can say is that trying to shovel snow that is soaked with rain is equivalent to participating in an Olympic power-lifting competition. My arms and shoulders felt as if I’d arm-wrestled King Kong by the time I was finished. But the end result was a nice clear path from my driveway all the way to the porch steps. I even used some sand I kept in a bucket and sprinkled the path, so it wouldn’t get slippery.

The next morning, I went out to the garage and discovered it had transformed into a skating rink – with my car’s tires embedded in the middle of it. I tried to open the automatic garage door, but it made a grinding sound and did nothing because it also was frozen in the ice. So I went back inside and out through the front door, onto the porch. What I saw made my mouth fall open.

My plow guy had plowed my driveway…right up to the steps. Gone was the path I’d worked on for an hour, and covering it were piles of slush-turned-ice chunks the size of beach balls. I inched my way down the steps and tried to pick up one of the giant ice-balls – it was frozen to the ground. So I got my snow shovel from the breezeway and tried to pry up the chunks with it.

I now am the proud owner (make that dumb owner) of a broken snow-shovel.

I contacted my plow guy and asked him if he had any suggestions about how to clear the chunks from the only path to my front porch, because I now had no access to it unless I climbed over them.

He apologized, saying he hadn’t been up to doing his usual quality of work when he’d plowed because he was suffering from a fever and chest tightness due to Covid, but he’d be over to try to clear the path for me.

I said, “Um, no, that’s okay…you just stay home and get some rest.”

“No, I insist!” he said. “This is the first complaint I’ve had since I’ve been in business, and I want to make it right!”

I was thinking I hadn’t really complained, I’d just asked him how to get rid of the chunks he’d put there – which, I suppose, might be considered more of an innuendo than an actual complaint.

My driveway and the back yard, however, were not chunky – they were glare ice. I expected to see Tara Lipinksi and Nancy Kerrigan doing triple toe-loops in my yard when I let my poor dogs out to “do their thing.” They ran out there at full speed, as usual, and both ended up sliding right into the fence. Then, I couldn’t help but giggle as they tried to assume the crouching position so they could “go,” but couldn’t get a solid footing and either kept falling over, or their legs would spread out so far apart in opposite directions, they looked as if they were doing the split.

I wasn’t afraid of walking down my quarter-mile driveway that suddenly resembled a bobsled track, however, to get my mail. I’d purchased some ice cleats months earlier when they’d been on clearance, so I felt ready to make the trek as easily as if it were on plain asphalt. I had to exit my house through the back door (seeing I couldn’t leave through the garage or the front door), and walk all the way around the house to the driveway.

Never had I seen it so icy. Even with the ice cleats on my boots, if I didn’t carefully step down solidly, one step at a time, my feet still would slide. I walked only about 20 feet before I gave up. Visions of my head cracking open like an egg on the solid ice had something to do with it. Banks of ice chunks also lined each side of the driveway, so I couldn’t walk there, either. Defeated, I headed back to the house.

The cold wave continued and my plow guy didn’t return, which worried me, considering he had Covid. So I contacted him to ask how he was doing.

“Well, I’m using a nebulizer right now and breathing is tough,” he said, “but I’ll still be over – and I’ll sand your driveway free of charge to make up for blocking the path you shoveled.”

I wasn’t about to pass up free sand. I mean, my food and paper-product rations were beginning to run out, considering I was trapped in my house. Even worse, the temperature fell to two below zero. I was beginning to feel destined to become a fossil, just like a frozen brontosaurus.

In desperation, I took my hair-dryer out to the garage and tried to thaw out my car’s tires, but it had about as much of an effect as trying to heat an entire room with a cigarette lighter.

I still hadn’t been able to get to my mailbox, so I grabbed the giant hedge-clippers and used them to cut a path through the woods and out to the road. It took ages, mainly because my arms still were so sore from all of the shoveling I’d done on the now-useless walkway, but the end result was a pretty decent trail through the snow – and best of all, no ice.

Unfortunately, the deer also thought the trail I’d cut was pretty nice and they used it, leaving a quarter-mile trail of deer poop on it. I didn’t know which was worse – risking falling on the ice, or risking falling into a pile of…well, you get the idea.

Two days later, I still was trapped. People offered to bring me food, supplies or a bucket of sand, but I didn’t want anyone to risk driving on my slick driveway. There is a big curve in the middle of it, and when it’s icy, cars don’t make the curve – they go straight, right into a big tree – and my homeowner’s insurance already is expensive enough.

And a bucket of sand on my driveway would be the equivalent of trying to put out a forest fire with a plastic squirt-gun.

Meanwhile, my supply of dog kibble was running low, and my two dogs were staring at me in a way that me think they were picturing me smothered in gravy. Also, there still was no word from my plow guy.

I wasn’t surprised when I contacted him once again (by e-mail, so as not to disturb him) and his wife responded saying he was in the hospital, but due to be released at any time. She said their son would be over in the morning to sand my driveway,

By then, I’d become pretty adept at dodging deer poop on my path through the woods to get my mail. I referred to it as my daily "dance of the doo-doo."

Finally, the temperature rose above freezing and my garage began to thaw. The door popped open after only a slight struggle, and my tires were able to break free when I tried to back the car out of the garage. However, I got only as far as the driveway and there was no traction whatsoever. The car wouldn’t move backwards any farther. It’s a front-wheel drive, so I at least was able to drive it back into the garage.

My plow guy, as it turned out, was released from the hospital at 4:30 in the morning and showed up here with a truckload of sand at 9 AM.

Talk about devotion.

So everything is good now and I’m free once again!

But I just heard the weather report. A big Nor’Easter is heading this way for the weekend, with heavy snow, howling winds and possible power outages.

You know, there’s a bear that hangs around out back here in my woods all summer. I think I’m going to try to make friends with him so I can hibernate with him all next winter.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net