A Pilgrim’s Digression

This weekend, we had our first real snow of the year.  Overall, it has been a mild winter.  December 2005 was much worse than anything we encountered in January or February, in terms of cold temperatures or snow.

Thus it came as a surprise to awaken Saturday morning to a dusting of snow on the ground and street, and more snow falling.

When I got up and announced that it was snowing, Brendan went right to the window.

“Gee, I didn’t even wear my pajamas inside out,” he said.  A teacher told him he could make it snow if he wore his pajamas inside out.

Lynn had already left the house.  Saturday was National Scrapbooking Day, and she spent the day scrapping with her girlfriends while Brendan and I had the house to ourselves.

I quickly planned a good day for us.  We would go to breakfast at the Waffle House.  Then to Wal-Mart to buy a “Thomas the Tank Engine” computer game Brendan has been wanting.  Then we would come home and build a snow man, if there was enough snow.  Then we would play his new computer game.  Then lunch.  And that was as far ahead as I could think.

During breakfast at the Waffle House, I couldn’t tell if the snow was going to amount to enough to make a snowman.  It fell thick and wet, and coated the ground and made the roads a little slippery, but it did not seem to be accumulating in proportion to how much was falling.  It seemed to me that much of it was melting as quickly as it fell.

By the time we got home from Wal-Mart, however, there was enough to build a snowman.  So I went in and got the camera, came back out, and together Brendan and I built our snowman.

His facial features were badly improvised.  I forgot to buy carrots at Wal-Mart, so we made do with some limp celery from the crisper for a nose, a twig from the back yard for a mouth, and two blue Diet Pepsi bottle caps from the floor of my car for his eyes.  Frosty, he ain’t.

Maybe he’s Frosty’s cousin Floyd.  I used the leafy ends of the celery stalk to represent hair growing out of his nose. Here are some pictures.

This first picture is of Brendan rolling Floyd’s head.  As you can see, rolling the body parts consumes all the snow on the ground in its path.  We rarely get enough snow to go sledding, let alone make a snowman without denuding the ground of white stuff.

This one is of the completed work of art:

This next one is of Floyd Complete.

Almost as soon as we finished the snow man, it stopped snowing.  It was about noon.  By sunset, the snow was melted away and only Floyd remained, looking quite decrepit and sagging.  I took no pics of his demise.  His eyes fell out.  Then his nose.  Then his nose hair.  The smile remained the longest, testament to the optimism of snowmen.

Such was the brief life of Floyd, the last snowman to live at our little townhouse.

We spent much of this weekend packing, and fretting about the coming week.  We are supposed to close on our house on Friday, but no one can say if that date is firm or not.  The real estate agent says he hasn’t received our paperwork from the finance company, and the mortgage broker says everything is fine, but she doesn’t know why the paperwork is delayed.

It’s a bit nerve wracking.  We have moved up our move date to Tuesday April 11.  We paid a hundred dollar deposit to the movers (they are charging us $500 for the move, which they estimate will take about four hours).

Our stuff is, for the most part, already packed.  Our townhouse walls are lined with stacks of boxes six feet high.  My clean underwear, as well as most of my other clothes, are in one of these boxes, left untaped for my convenience.

Our landlord has already found a tenant to replace us.  This deal has to come off.  And everyone says it will come off.  But we are still nervous.

Last night, I dreamed that we were living in our new home.  I was standing at a living room window with a cup of coffee in my hand, completely self-satisfied and smug.

Suddenly, I see a group of children and an adult man calmly galavanting across our front yard.  They stop in our yard and begin throwing a football.  A couple kids are chasing each other with sticks, all around my car.

And this is what is strange, because I am not an angry or confrontational person, by nature: I sit my coffee down and go charging out the door, mad as hell.

I give the adult the full load of verbal buckshot, not bothering with the lower tier of curse words such as “hell” or “damn.”

“What the fuck is going on here?”  I yell, waving my arms.

He ignores me and goes on throwing the football, looking perturbed, as if I am disturbing a most important matter.

“Did you hear me, Asshole, I said what the motherfucking bloody hell is going on?  What the fuck do you people think you’re doing?”

He shrugs and still doesn’t answer me.  I am a homeowner now, however, a property owner, and I will not be ignored.  I get in his face.

“Answer me, you stupid prick!  This is my yard, my house, that is my car.  Get the fuck off my property.”

Sullenly, he says to the kids, “Come on, let’s go.”

“Yeah, get the fuck away from my car, you little piss ants,” I say to the kids.  “You scratch my car and I’ll sue your fucking parents ’til they wish they’d aborted you, you shits.”

After they go off down the street, I go back up to the house, but my equanimity is disturbed beyond repair.  I don’t understand why I became so enraged, and I don’t understand why I could not control myself.

Then, I imagine the kids coming back under cover of darkness and keying my car.  This thought begins to obsess my dream self.  I see them doing it, and there is nothing I can do.  I begin to weep.