Let
it snow, let it snow – NOT!
by
Robert LaFrance
I was astonished – as I often am –
by what I saw out my living room window yesterday afternoon, just as the aroma
of highly spiced spaghetti sauce was wafting around inside this house.
Two persons rode by on bicycles. The road wasn’t
quite glare ice, but it was on its way in that direction. Occasionally one bike
would spin out and the rider would go flying. Were they crazy or what? I went
down to the road, wanting to size them up before they started down the steep
east side of Manse Hill.
“Hi ho,” I said intelligently. “None of my business,
but why are you folks out riding your bicycles when the road is so slippery I
have to be careful with my Corolla that has top-of-the-line snow tires?”
One of the cyclists took off his helmet and I
recognized Barley Gibbers. “We went by here last summer and you came down to
talk to us, don’t you remember?” I said I did. “Well, what we’re doing today is
recycling.”
***********************
One of last week’s snowstorms
dropped about 40 centimetres of snow here at our estate; you may possibly have
noticed this yourself, if you live in this county or in nearby Maine. Then two
days later Environment Canada (my old crowd) predicted we would receive “5 to
10 centimetres” the next day.
That doesn’t sound like much, if you
say it fast, but the trouble is that Environment Canada has a kind of code
known only to weather people, an entity that I used to be. When they say “5 to
10 centimetres” that is Codespeak for “30 centimetres or more, and probably
more – you’re on your own”. If you don’t believe me, keep checking the EC
website (https://weather.gc.ca) and if the
forecast for here suggests we are about to get “5 to 10 centimetres”, reach for
a plane ticket to somewhere far south, like Maugerville, or even Brazil. You
might consider Singapore, where my second elder daughter lives. Average
temperature there is 30ºC. That’s ABOVE zero Celsius.
Back to the plight of us/we who live
in New Brunswick, Canada, and wouldn’t want it any other way, it fell to me to
clean off our porch roof with shovel and scoop. When I got out of bed about
7:30 I wondered why it was still dark out and the knowledge soon filtered into
the old grey matter that a snowdrift covered almost the entire bedroom window.
It behooved me to get up and shovel.
I went onto the porch and got a
small scoop and a small shovel, then brought them to the upstairs bathroom.
(“Where else?” you are asking.) After shoveling my way out of that window and
onto the porch roof, I was able to remove two-thirds of the snow before my
get-up-and-go got up and went. At least the roof wasn’t likely to cave in.
Truth to tell, something I try and avoid, there wasn’t much danger of that
anyway because the snow was not of the super-heavy variety as it was after one
storm about ten years ago, but that’s another story for another day.
***********************
When I visited my friend Flug on
Monday evening, he was watching a CBC-TV program called “The Outsiders Among
Us”. It was about homeless people in various Canadian cities.
The women who used to be called ‘bag
ladies’ when I lived in cities (1967-1976) have a scary existence, if you can
call that existing. The men, who were usually alone rather than hanging around
with others in their situation, were no more inspiring. The camera followed
several homeless people in Edmonton, Toronto and other places and it was
amazing to see them crawling into their cardboard shelters for the night or
picked up by the police and taken to homeless shelters for the night. The next
morning they would be turned out again to fend for themselves, but at least
they had had a meal at the shelter.
Flug and I watched silently, sipping
on water instead of our usual lemonade. The program pointed out that a few
million dollars in donations from those lucky enough to have roofs over their
heads could provide food and lodging for these people and get many of them some
much needed medical care.
Once the program was over, we just
looked at each other and we were each thinking the same thing, I am sure:
“Tomorrow I go up and donate food and money to the food bank.”
I’m not sure if this was planned,
but a TV program soon afterward described how pet owners lavished expensive
food, shelter and medical care on their pets. One cat, found in the woods, had
a $1500 operation before it died two days later. Not to pass judgment or
anything, but that $1500 would have bought a lot of hot soup for homeless humans.-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment