Ah, the snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon! White doom! Yet another lesson in learning to let go of the things over which I have no control. Normally I would be pretty nonplussed over the whole thing. I can work from home. I have plenty of groceries. My Grandma – snug in her apartment a few suburbs away – might be running low on sherry but she’s fine in terms of critical provisions.
With my surgery a little over a week away now, though, I’ve had to bat back breathless little moments that are not quite anxiety attacks but are uncomfortable nonetheless. With the storm on the horizon, I postponed my pre-op physical on Friday and couldn’t get a new appointment because the office was too slammed. Of course now I’m rethinking the wisdom of that — I could have made it home easily, as it turns out, since the storm didn’t get truly dangerous until late in the afternoon. Again: let that go, I keep saying, until the tension dissolves. I made the best decision with the information I had at the time. Getting stuck in Baltimore for this historic, paralyzing, crippling, ridiculously hyperbolic storm would have left me far more stressed out, right? Anyway, it’s done, and I’ll sort it out tomorrow.
I have another quick little appointment tomorrow morning, and as my car is encased in boulders of post-plow snow, I floundered a bit trying to figure out a way to get there. The answer was pretty clear: neighbor-friends with a 4×4 would most likely be happy to assist, but asking? I sat here more or less attempting to will the boulders away for an hour before I picked up the phone. Getting over that, understanding that just as I’m happy to do stuff like that for other people, other people are happy to return the favor… it’s foreign territory to me. I can’t do everything myself, that while self-sufficiency is a great trait, it’s also an isolating sort of martyrdom that makes life far more difficult than it need be. So anyway, it’s a relief to have a way to get there that doesn’t involve starting to walk there now, or postponing it until it might affect the scheduling of my surgery.
Being snowbound is sort of nice, and I’ve cleaned out a couple of closets and started to get my head around having my mom here next week. I did venture outside, which was a comedic adventure that included bumbling through hip-high snow on what was I assume the sidewalk to my car. I would have fallen over if it hadn’t been physically impossible to do so. Then I towered over it as I stood on compacted snowdrifts, yanking and pulling giant heavy snow slabs off of the roof, windshield and hood until it emerged, half-visible, from its snowy tomb. A generally pointless exercise, since I won’t realistically get the car out for another day or two, but it was satisfying to get out there and do something other than laundry!
I came back inside more or less covered from head to toe with heavy, wet snow, my jeans, gloves and socks soaked through. I popped everything into the dryer, which recalled pleasant ruddy-cheeked memories of my Minnesota youth, where an afternoon of sledding and fort-building ended with snowmobile suits rumbling in the dryer while we drank hot chocolate. I had coffee instead, but the victorious feeling of toying with the tundra, of having conquered nature in some small way, was the same.