A Cure For The Blues

We have been going through a cycle of snow followed by warm weather for about a month now. This has caused the eight to ten inches of snow we have on the ground to melt and freeze many times. Some of the melting snow had turned to water while the rest has been compressed into very thick ice/snow. At the entrance to most of the alleys and all but the main street intersections the snow had melted into huge lakes of frozen ice that reach to the top of the sidewalk curbs.

The last few days the weather has been warm enough for the melting snow and ice to form channels of water. Now instead of ice lakes at the intersections we had large chunks of ice about six inches high separated by just as deep channels of water. This has made driving and walking around town even more difficult that it had been.

Yesterday was a sloppy wet day with the temperature reaching 54F/12.2C. The weatherman was forecasting very cold temperature and (of course) high winds for today. All that melting snow and ice was going freeze up again by this morning.

Yesterday afternoon I looked out the front window and noticed our truck was sitting in its own lake of water. I told my husband and then said we should go out and see if we could open up a channel along the curb to allow the water to drain away before it turned to ice. He agreed and we got a couple of shovels and started digging at the ice next to the curb. What we really needed was a pick-ax. It took forever to slowly chip away enough ice to get the water to drain away from the truck. When it did I notice all we had really done was create a larger lake right in front of our next door neighbor's house. I walked down there and started chipping ice away from their cub while my husband tried to make the channel we had already created a little wider to get the water to move faster.

After a bit I got enough ice chipped way to start the water moving again. My husband had also finished widening the canal we had created and the water moved at a pretty good clip. While I stood there watching the result of all our hard work I realize I no longer felt depressed. Nothing like a little physical labor to change your brain chemistry and pull you out of the blues.