Winter

My dad had given us his old John Deere 420 garden tractor with a snow thrower attached to the front. Dad had already replaced it with a newer tractor and the old 420 was just sitting around his acreage taking up space. I had somewhat reluctantly agreed to take it, wondering what I would do with it. The weather that was about to hit us made me very aware of what to do with it, and extremely grateful to dad for the gift. The snow storms that came were like nothing I had ever seen in person, only in the movies. The wind coming out of the west across miles of empty fields was so fierce and steady that we were constantly clearing the driveway and parking lot of drifts. It blew into every nook and cranny in the outbuildings, and through the tiny pinholes where the garage doors did not seal with the pavement. The wind blew so hard that several times I had to shovel foot high drifts that had grown inside the garage from those pinholes. We heard news about “polar vortex” and “cyclone bomb”, and almost every storm that blew in had a wind advisory. After one of the worst ones our farmer neighbor drove over to help clear our drive on his tractor mounted with a double auger thrower that shot the snow up over the power lines and the machine shed, and then he dug out our mailbox with the end loader. After that same storm four plows were clearing our gravel road and one got stuck in the 10 foot high drift in front of our house and had to be pulled free by one of the others. Unbelievable, but it really couldn’t get any worse. Then the blizzard hit.