Island Life: When It Snows, It SNOWS

I love snow! So fluffy and pretty, so magical, so peaceful, so…inconvenient.

Well, not usually. Usually we’re pretty self-sufficient out here. You have to be, to want to live on an island with only an unreliable (and fairly expensive) ferry system to connect you to “civilization”. We work at home (even before the pandemic), we’re always well-stocked with groceries and toilet paper and wine, we have plenty of firewood…so when it started dumping down snow just before Valentine’s Day, we oohed and ahed and took lots of pictures…

…and began worrying about whether we were going to be able to make it down the hill to get our covid vaccinations.

Longtime readers (like from, say, two weeks ago) will recall that we’ve been working hard trying to get on the list to get vaccinated…with very little results.

But then a miracle happened! Instead of the sometimes-200, sometimes-zero weekly doses our county was getting, suddenly the National Guard got involved and delivered 1900 doses, and we got appointments! They were for Tuesday morning…two days after the lovely Valentine’s Day snowpocalypse.

And it WAS lovely. We went for a walk in it, and my toes got super cold because we kept stopping to take pictures.

“It’ll clear by Tuesday morning,” we told ourselves. We checked the weather forecast: it agreed. Rain would be starting Sunday evening; Monday’s temperatures would be in the forties.

Well. It did rain, and the temps did warm…but nevertheless, the snow persisted.

But all’s well that ends well, I am delighted to report!

Tuesday morning, we bundled up and hiked out to the main road, as our driveway was still shin-deep and slick as snot. (Good thing we didn’t try to drive: along the way, we passed a neighbor and her husband, trying to tow her stuck car off the shared one-lane road.) Down in civilization, a friend picked us up–she was only a bit late, after pulling one of her stuck neighbors out of a ditch–and dropped us off at the vaccination site.

It was a model of efficiency and good cheer. The slowest part of the process was taking OFF all these layers of clothes so that our skin could be found for the needle…then waiting fifteen minutes to make sure we didn’t have a reaction…and then we were free to go!

One more month till our second dose. I feel just fine physically, and completely thrilled to be finally embarking on the journey back toward…well, toward whatever the new normal will look like.

And that snow outside is still awful pretty.