Can Mother Nature sign my Absence Slip?

For anyone who has viewed my blog the past six days only to discover I have not added a new post since last Wednesday, there is a reason and I do have a good excuse.  Friends and family who live nearby will know exactly what caused the delay, as they too were dealing with the same issue…the force of nature called Mother Nature. 

And boy was she mad!

We were all tickled to see the first bits of snow when it finally decided to stick.  The words “No School” due to snow always bring on happy faces in my house.  We were then impressed when we received first six inches of snow and then another ten inches the following day.  I don’t recall having to use a measuring tape before but last week it was necessary in order to record an unbelievable 16 inches of snow.  In this neck of the woods, getting more than a foot is a rare treat, or trick, depending on your point of view.

Here’s a shot of the pretty white stuff…our driveway is in there somewhere.

Snow just makes everything beautiful, doesn’t it? 

That was the fun part.

We were then hit with freezing rain, rather than the nice warm snow-melting rain we had been promised by our weatherman, or woman, as the case may be.  For a solid day, we lost limb after limb and tree after tree, as they snapped, crackled and popped from all the heavy frozen snow attached to the limbs and the tops of the trees. 

I’ve honestly never heard anything like it. 

I’ve heard trees fall during a good wind storm and we had a severe ice storm years ago but this was something else.  Every few seconds was one more loss to the forest, causing damage or demise to hundreds of trees as they continued to snap and fall.  It sounded like a war zone outside; rifle after rifle shot ricocheting off the hills. 

This all would have been bad enough but Mother Nature had not completed her alterations to the tree line or the hillsides.  Next for our viewing pleasure was a slight thaw.

What did this produce?  An amazing amount of snow still remained on the branches or tops of the trees.  If it wasn’t weighing down the branches so that they snapped and plummeted to the ground in a heap, the snow itself was falling through the branches, breaking into pieces and then hitting the ground as loud as a glass chandelier might sound after falling from a high ceiling.

All of this, in a word, was amazing, sometimes frightening, but most certainly, it was a nuisance.  The storm itself was not so much a nuisance as was the after effects.  The roads were a mess or impassable, power lines and trees were everywhere, and power was out for days and days and days (five and a half days for us).  Offices and businesses had to close, schools were closed, phones and computers were down. 

Work could not be adequately accomplished.

And that, my friends, is the rub.  It is ironic that at the end of my last post I commented on how thankful I was to have access to current technology, as the very thought of writing, editing and rewriting a book on a manual typewriter is just too much to even contemplate.  Since Mother Nature decided to throw one of her winter tantrums at us, it left me wishing I had some other way to work, where I did not have to function only with items containing wires.  I might have been able to accomplish much more these past six days if I did not rely so heavily on modern technology. 

Hi, my name is Paula, and I am captivated with modern technology.

That said, the power is finally back on, my office is nice and toasty and the computer is warmed up and ready to exert itself at my command.  Rather than continue to focus with regret on what I was not able to accomplish these past six days, I will now take pleasure in the technological wonders available to me because they are what make life and work more manageable.  I won’t deny I very much enjoy the fact that I can now continue with my writing, in the new-fashion way.