Sick and tired

Great White Dispatch
Notes from Damn Near Canada
No. 8
10/30/08
0500

I’m sitting here at 5 a.m. in a Benadryl haze, looking out into the frosty Minnesota dark. For the first time –literally- in my life I’ve left work early, just too sick to go on. It’s just too hard to deal cards when they’re covered in snot. My body feels like it’s just been thrown a blanket party, my head feels filled with sand, and there’s just one thing on my mind: Winter is coming.

It was cold last night, that shocking kind of cold that takes your lungs by surprise. Autumn here crashed quickly, came and went before it ever really started. One day the trees were full and green, the next they were empty. It was like the earth simply shrugged out of its clothes. The bare trees have made the drive into town a different experience. Entire neighborhoods that I didn’t even know existed revealed themselves once the leaves were gone. A world beneath the world. I even discovered that I have a neighbor. One day I looked into the woods behind my garage, and hey, there’s a house across the ravine. Suddenly I wonder about all those times at 2 a.m. I was naked on the porch screaming at dogs.

Winter is coming. The people around here are quietly battening hatches. Plastic is going up over windows. Plows are appearing on the fronts of every third pickup. Pyramids of deicer suddenly pop up at every retail outlet. After a few easy winters, the Minnesotans are smelling a bad one. I’m getting a lot of ‘New to the area?” followed by smirks and giggles. C’mon. It’s not like we moved here from Arizona. I know about winter.

Still. There’s things I need to do. Hatches of my own to take care of. Just secured a nice 4WD beater to buzz around in for the next few months. It occurs to me that I need a chainsaw, because if a tree goes down on the road back here, we’re pretty much fooked. And I’m swallowing my pride and getting a snowblower. I’ve always scoffed at those douchepackers in their little suburban developments, blowing the snow off their 13-foot patch of concrete, vowed to never be one of those. Well, this ain’t no development. However the hell I get down my .6 mile of dirt road, a shovel will not be involved.

The sky is purpling now, sun coming soon. Any time now the deer and squirrels will be out, stuffing themselves on the buckets of whole corn I’ve thrown. They have to fatten themselves up. Winter is coming.