November 26, 2013

Because sometimes life is just not hard enough

Because sometimes life is just not hard enough, what you really need in the middle of an ongoing emergency situation where your access road has been crumpled up and tipped into a field and your garden is being eaten away chunk by chunk before your eyes, is a really heavy snowfall. The kind of too-early-in-the-year wet snow that bows down the trees with its weight, adheres to fences and walls with its stickiness and gives a unique and lethal slipperiness to the roads. That white snow-light coming through the curtain when I woke up nearly made me cry.



Mid-morning, soon after the Internet went down (that was a given, right?), the electricity also cut out. I went to check the fusebox and then looked outside. My eye was caught by a flash of orange. At the top of a pole. It was the Man From ENEL. I bundled up and went out to talk to him — or rather shout to him, up his pole. He waved at me. "Tira aria!" he shouted. Yes, it sure was windy.

So the dangerous wires across the road are now gone, and at least we can cross mains electrocution off our list of safety in the home issues — though the pole's still leaning, so I'm not ruling out some kind of one-in-a-thousand accident involving that.


Meanwhile the landslip near the house seems to be coming closer, or rather getting wider, but it's hard to tell in the snow as everything looks altered.Tomorrow the schools are closed because of the conditions, so the Boy, at least, is happy.

No comments: