Every spring brings not just the greening of the hillsides, but the mud season here in Nederland. The normal mud season is late April/early May when the last of the winter snows melt. But this year, because of the prolonged rain through the month of May, we’ve had a second mud season, one that has lasted the entire month. Because we live off a network of dirt roads, and have a dirt driveway, in addition to the dirt trails in the neighborhood, the mud is everywhere. There are little rivulets of water streaming across the roads, down the hillsides. It’s hard to take more than ten steps outside the front door without walking through mud.
I don’t know if you remember the old Subaru commercials from many years ago, that showed Subarus careening through the mountains, crashing through the streams, only to show the car at the end of the commercial covered in mud, so you could barely discern the paint color? Well, that’s my car on pretty much a daily basis. I accepted a long time ago that I would have a dusty car living in the mountains, but now it’s a splattered car. I’ve pretty much given up on trying to wash it, because the next day it’s back to the mud. The one bonus to this is my license plate is so splattered with mud, you can’t even really read the numbers. So, if by chance I get nabbed by the “Speedy Van” at the bottom of Boulder Canyon, I probably wouldn’t get a ticket. (The “Speedy Van” is a minivan type vehicle that is set up with radar and takes a picture of vehicles that are more than 10 miles over the speed limit. Then they send you a letter asking you to pay a fine of $40.)
The biggest problem with the mud is managing to arrive at work looking halfway clean. Between walking the dogs in the morning, and trying to avoid the splatter from cars driving down the road to just trying to get out of my car without getting mud all over the pants, it’s a challenge each and every day. It wasn’t until I went to the restroom after having been at work for three hours, that I realized I had dried mud all over the back of both my pant legs. Whey don’t people ever tell you these things?
There is hope though. Supposedly, after next weekend, we will finally start to get some drier and warmer weather. With luck, the mud season will finally end in another week or so, and I will hopefully start to look like a cleaner person.
