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Bryon standing in our driveway

Taking the dogs out in the morning, it was eerily quiet.  The whole world had been transformed into our own personal snow globe with white as far as the eye could see and flakes still tumbling out of the sky.  My first clue to the enormous amount of snow we had received was that the deck railing was about to completely disappear from sight.  The railing sits four feet above the deck.

The second clue is the fact the road hadn’t been cleared and there was now well over another foot of snow that had accumulated.  Normally, our neighbor up the street is out with his pickup and plow blade clearing the private dirt road we live off of.  But this particular morning — nothing.  Later on in the afternoon, I heard a noise, sounding like heavy equipment used at a construction site.  We peered out the window to see what looked like an excavator coming down our back road, emblazoned with the words Caterpillar on the side.

Clue number three to the depth of the snow came when Simon, our retriever, tried to bound through the snow to his favored potty spot, and immediately sunk below the surface of the snow.  The only sign of the large black dog was his feathered tail sticking out the top, much like the periscope of a submarine.  He started frantically clawing at the snow, trying desperately to “swim” out, to no avail.  I had to initiate a rescue mission to extricate him from his spot.

Clue number four was the berm, the impossibly tall, rock hard berm at the head of the driveway.  While we do have a pretty amazing snowblower, attempting to blast through the berm is a sure recipe for disaster.  So while Bryon ran the snowblower in the middle of the driveway, I set about shoveling the berms.  It felt like someone had deposited a pile of boulders, that had then frozen over solid.

With that much snow, I had to shovel in layers — first scoop one off the top, and keep scooping another layer, until around the fifth layer, I had hit the ground.  This went on for about an hour, until the impossible berm had actually been removed.  As my shoulders and arms ached, I smiled — there would be no need to do any weight training tonight!

Such was life over this past weekend, when our home in Nederland received a whopping 43 inches of snow over the course of the weekend.  As the biggest snowfall we’ve had since moving here, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Mother Nature’s bounty.  An epic snowstorm of that size will do that to you.

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