Country singer Blake Shelton once said,

The wussiest thing a guy can do is drive a clean truck. Dents, scratches and mud – that’s manly.

If that’s true, then Nederland is full of manly men, and manly women for that sake.  I love snow and everything that has to do with snow, but the problem with getting two feet of snow during spring time, is when the sun comes out and starts to melt all that snow, you are left with mud.  And when you live on a dirt road, and drive dirt roads to get to the dirt road that you live on, all that mud ends up all over your car and everywhere else.

You know those commercials for jeeps and four wheel drive SUVs they want to portray as the car of fun-loving adventurous people everywhere?  You know the commercial, where the earthy, yet attractive 30ish man and woman are driving their said jeep/SUV through rivers and up mountains, gleefully smiling, and the vehicle is getting splattered with mud all over the place so you can barely see what color it is?  Well, that is the state of my Subaru pretty much every day right now.

The bottom half of my red Forester is caked with what seems like a permanent brown stripe.  There is a faint, slightly clear half moon shape etched into an other-wise hazy brown rear window.  Every time I stop at a gas station, I spend a good 10-15 minutes trying to rid the brown caked on my windows and headlights, only to have it get mukked up again within a few minutes of driving it through the slushy, mukky roads of Nederland. I don’t think my car will ever look red again.

As if driving a disgustingly muddy car weren’t bad enough, the mud that cakes the doors seems to glom onto me whenever I get in or out of the car.  I went down to Boulder tonight to meet with friends, and realized as I was walking that the back of my jeans were covered with giant globs of mud.  My husband commented that I looked like I had dog poo on me — just the look I was going for to show my earthiness.  Yesterday, I wore black boots and realized as I was walking into a very nice restaurant, that my black boots were now mud covered.

I can not seem to rid myself of the mud, and then the mud eventually makes it into our house as well. Between me tracking it in with my boots, and our dogs coming in after being outside sloshing around in the mud, our wood floors become increasingly  duller and dirtier with each passing day.  I valiantly try to wipe off the dog paws, to clean up the wood floors, but I am clearly losing the battle.

I know one day in the months to come, that the snow will melt, the skies will warm, and the mud will finally dissipate.  With summer, the mud will eventually disappear to bring something else.  Just in time for the warm days of keeping our windows open, instead of mud we will have dust.

Welcome to life in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado….

 

promoblock