Rain Check; RESILIENCE to MARCH On

💪😂👀🐶🐎

It's March 1 and rain-check time.

Also, time for a healthy sense of humor and a whole lot of resilience, which is well-honed in North Idaho residents. 

 

It's also the first time in our 47-year marriage that Bill has driven me home from getting the morning paper.

The paper box is only a couple of hundred feet from the house, but he got in the white pickup, backed it through the driveway and picked me up. 

That was after he had come out of the house and headed my direction with two trekking poles.

That was after I yelled at the top of my lungs about three times, "BILL!  BILL!  BILL!

I yelled at him cuz I was stuck in the front yard, one muck boot down to the ground in snow, the other above the ground with its owner not wanting that leg to join the other. 

A school bus drove by while I was stuck there. Hope the driver didn't see me. 

As Bill slowly made his way from the house down the driveway toward me, I managed to pull my left foot, muck boot and all out of the snow. 

The reason I was stuck in the snow was because I took a route through the yard, rather than the driveway, toward the paper box.

I did that because the middle part of the driveway was a sheet of ice and slush and mush covered by a flowing lake about eight inches deep. 

Safer to go through the snow, I thought, cuz my mush boots are too big for Yak Trax. 

Well, once I got that one leg and the boot out of the snow, I started cautiously taking one light step at a time and saying some silent prayers. 

I also watched Bill making his way at a snail's pace in his muck boots with his trekking poles down the ice driveway. 

Before he reached the flooded section, I said, "Go back.  Get the pickup and come and pick me up if I make it to the paper box. 

At first, he may have thought I was nuts, but he also had seen the icy, wet obstacle between him and the end of the driveway. 

So, he obliged.  Only one more leg and muck boot sank into the snow but I made it to the paper box. 

Hail Mary's are handy when you need them. 

When I climbed in the pickup, we both broke out laughing. 

After all it had been a busy morning after a crazy, somewhat disastrous day where barn stalls flooded and the garage was beginning to flood until Bill came home from work and set sand bags along the area.

 The lake out in the driveway had taken care of my first set of clothes AND my boots with Yak Trax. 

That happened when I had backed the car away from the house to move some of the cement snow piles away from the garage and shop doors. 

The lake had been deceiving.  I stepped out of the Subaru into eight inches of the aforementioned moisture. 

Bill bought me those muck boots about three years ago and I had never worn them until yesterday. 

They did okay yesterday when I fed the horses out in their barnyard where they would have to stay for the night. 

The boots also worked for other outdoor ventures because yesterday everything was mush.

This morning that mush has frozen, even through a balmy night. 

Inexplicable, for sure.  

First thing, this morning we also had another inexplicable situation.

I opened the door from the laundry room to the garage and saw something white moving on the floor runner. 

I turned on the light in time to watch a mouse pulling a mouse trap down the runner. The trap had caught its tail. 

OMG, I said to myself, along with some other words, as I watched the trap bounce around with help from its mouse power. 

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when you deal with anything North Idaho in the winter time deals to you is to go into problem-solving mode. 

How am I gonna catch this mouse and its trap and get it the hell out of here? 

Well, during my brief thought processing, the mouse took initiative, led its trap back to the freezer and scurried underneath with the trap trailing behind it. 

I was kind of amazed that the trap would fit under the freezer, but when a mouse is on a mission, anything can happen. 

Later, Bill came out and cleared away all the stuff next to the freezer and asked for a small yellow horse supplement bucket which he would use to catch the mouse.  

We could still hear the trap rattling, and when all the stuff was gone from next to the freezer, figured the mouse was still underneath.

About an hour later, I walked out to once again see the trap bouncing down the runner. 

I summoned Bill.  

He grabbed the bucket, and we both chased the mouse and its trap to a corner near the door. 

Bill was just about to go in for his yellow-bucket assault when the mouse miraculously separated its tail from the trap and ran off to who knows where. 

I really don't want to bore you with what was happening in the house while we were chasing down the mouse.

 Nonetheless, I will tell you that it involved a Border Collie pup, climbing up toward the living room shelves where we keep all the trinkets, selecting the stuffed Border Collies we brought home from Ireland, taking them to her spot on the carpet and proceeding to maul them. 

We went out of the house twice on morning missions.  Bridie stole two different doggies during our absences.  

The "you can't make this stuff up" syndrome is alive and well here at the Lovestead.

I also have a feeling that we will not need an imagination to document all further happenings with this "it's gonna get worse before it gets better" phase of Winter 2022. 

About the only good thing I can report from yesterday is also somewhat inexplicable. 

After a bad loss Saturday night, the Gonzaga Bulldogs are still ranked No. 1 in NCAA men's basketball.

I'm thinking that makes up for the time last year when they did NOT lose and lost their No. 1 ranking. 

All in all, the Lovestead situation is not as bad as what Johnny Cash learns in the narrative of this classic, but, as I said yesterday, everything's relative. 

The water is high enough.