Slight Detour: Life in the Selle Snow Globe

A snow shovel in one picture; a birthday boy riding a horse in the desert in the other.

The snow-shovel picture caption, written by a former student named Ellen read "So, I'm really starting to hate winter and want to move to Arizona. However, I really do like shoveling snow at night. Weird."

The birthday boy, Dr. John, who grew up here, posted the photo of a desert trail ride at my request.

Arizona or anywhere the sun is shining and there's no snow is probably pretty appealing to a lot of North Idaho folks after yesterday's all-day, half-the-night snow event.

I think possibly the snow globe beauty of it all was wearing thin. At least, it was at this household.

When you have to shovel, blow or plow beauty to places where there's not much room left for more beauty, you get a little testy.

And, when you know more beauty is gonna cover up all that clear area where you just cleared out, you might even utter a few expletive deleteds.

My main frustration with yesterday's snow had more to do with other things I had to do than the snow itself.

Like get out the driveway to go take a picture.

That had to wait a while.

As county snow plows went by doing their duty and snow continued to fall, the berm at the end of the driveway grew. It also lacked the fluffiness of the other white droppings.

Bill had wanted to wait for the snow to stop before plowing the second time yesterday.

Since we both had to get out, I suggested that he relent and at least go plow the end of the driveway, which he did.

He pointed his pickup east, then pulled the Subaru out and did the same.

When we both arrived home later, we agreed that it was a bit hazardous out there, especially in the Selle area where wide open farm fields tend to contribute to "white-outs" on snowy days.

A couple of times, I breathed sighs of relief upon realizing that I had guessed the right places to turn off the highway.

Bill plowed again last night and again this morning. There's more to do, but an hour or two of plowing and snow blowing calls for a break.

It seems like a never-ending story, especially since I heard "winter storm warning" on KPND while cleaning out stalls this morning.

At least two more inches of snow with rain, the announcer said.

Yup, we're getting humbled, as we always do when we have the audacity to think we're gonna make it through a North Idaho winter without a lot of extra effort.

Silly us!

It's all perspective, though, or relative as some folks might say.

I did see one more picture on Facebook this morning.

It was posted by Tammy Tucker VanTuyl whose family roots run deep out this way.

In fact, my sisters live on a piece of Tucker family land at Colburn.

After seeing Tammy's photo which she found on www.historyofidaho.com, I figured it might be a good idea to cut the complaining and accept the fact that what we're dealing with this week could be a LOT worse.

Sandpoint, Idaho, Feb. 6, 1937.