Winter storm Quiana

33° and raining yesterday. 29° and snowing today. Quiana is next in the parade of winter storms that has hammered us, one after another, for what seems to be as long as I remember. This winter has sucked. I recently read a news brief about a small moon of Neptune, now named Hippocamp (mythological creature with the head of a horse and the tail of a fish). Analysis of Hubble data has revealed that Hippocamp has been repeatedly blown apart by meteor collisions, and the fragments coalesce again from the forces of gravity. I see this as a metaphor for my life this winter.

33 degrees and raining

Faithful readers may have noticed that I did not post last week. If you inferred a crisis, you were correct. My dad woke up Sunday morning unable to catch his breath. We called 911. The ambulance took him to Harvard, where he was intubated and sedated. He was then transferred to Rockford. To make a long story short, he had a tiny heart attack coupled with pneumonia. He was in bad shape. We had dark and difficult conversations with doctors and nurses, drawing ever-thinner lines in the quicksand between palliative care and heroic measures. We were pretty sure we were going to lose him.

And yet, the night passed without The Phone Call. On Monday, he was weaned off the ventilator and took up breathing on his own, thank you very much, although he did have supplemental oxygen. Tuesday he was lethargic, but by Wednesday, cheered by the possibility of going home Thursday, he was quite chatty and personable. He didn’t go home on Thursday because the doctors were still tweaking his meds, but he came home Friday and did not even need to have oxygen. He does need to have all his food thickened, though, because his epiglottis isn’t closing properly from the breathing tube. In many cases, this damage does reverse. He will be tested again in a month.

We had a break in the weather Friday. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Doug (my brother) was with Hilda and Dad in the hospital. I was done with work at 1:00, and looked forward to getting a haircut and cleaning the chicken coop.

At some point in our lives (or my life, anyway), chores stop being a burden and start being cherished rituals, like thumb tacks that keep the fluttering pieces of our lives from blowing away in the winds, or the gravity that reassembles the fragments of meteor collisions. It is probably that gradual transition between scrubbing the garbage can vs. playing (I grew up before plastic garbage bags—hard to imagine, right?) to cleaning the chicken coop vs. helplessly sitting in the hospital wondering if your parent is going to die. Believe me, cleaning the coop is much more satisfying.

The chicken coop was literally a shit-storm. It made my eyes water. We can keep the coop pretty clean when we can get out there just after the girls have woken up. At that time, we can remove the poop from under the roost before the chickens have buried it. In nice weather, they spend the day outside, fertilizing the run. In order to maintain laying during the winter, we have to extend the day by having a light go on very early in the morning. By the time we get out there, the poop has been scratched into the wood chips. In addition, there have been so many days when we left the girls cooped up because they would not have gone out anyway. So all of the night poop and all of the day poop accumulates.

In half an hour, I had all of the dirty wood chips in muck buckets and new, piney-smelling chips in place. Sadly, the girls are staying in today because of 50 mph winds from the northwest. Sigh. Then as now, chores are never done.

Clean wood chips!

Bianca, by the way, looks fine. Which is good because I didn’t have time to fool with giving her vitamins this week. In fact, Terry, bless his heart, took over the feeding and watering during the crisis.

Bianca looks perfectly normal

After the rain yesterday, some patches of bare ground started peeking through. If the sun would just shine before we get more snow, the ground would heat up and the melting would accelerate. The forecast, however, is not promising. The field has a giant puddle, now frozen, which will likely become a flood when warm weather comes, if ever. March begins next week. I keep telling myself that spring is coming.

Patches of bare ground peeking through the snow

Glaciation

We’ve had it all in the last two weeks: snow, bitter cold, freezing rain, rain, freezing rain, bitter cold, snow. Today I have been playing Heinous Choices, Winter Edition. Would you rather drive to work in extreme cold, snow, or freezing rain? I do not enjoy extreme cold, but I put it #1 on my list. It only requires precautions. Keep the gas tank full, have a good battery, wear an enormous number of layers covering every inch of skin, and spend as little time as possible outdoors. Snow is second. It slows everything down, but if you proceed with caution you will make it. Ice, however, is terrifying, The whole world becomes an accident waiting to happen, a crashed car, a broken bone. Tiny steps everywhere I go.

Freezing rain on top of snow makes glaciers, such as the one currently covering our driveway. By going ever so slowly, I have made it out with no problem. When coming into the garage, with gravity working against me, I had a bit of a problem. I let the car slide backwards a bit, and got traction somehow on the second attempt.

The glacier on the driveway, viewed from the garage. Terry chipped the ice off the curve.

On the day when temperatures crept ever so slightly above freezing, Terry chipped the ice of the curve in the driveway.

Here are the ice chunks that Terry scraped off the driveway

Now I stop on the clear spot to open the garage door, and don’t slow down until I’m in the garage.

We had a bright sunny day yesterday. The ice sparkled on the trees in the maple forest and the grasses in the field.

Sparkling trees and grasses

Here is a picture of iced-up spruce branches.

Iced-up spruce branches

I took an ice scraper—walking very carefully—out to the solar panels. I was delighted to see that the ice was melting rapidly. All I had to do is nudge the remaining sheets over the dividers between the panels, and down they came. I also learned quickly to step aside because there was enough ice there to be painful when it hit me in the thighs.

I had every intention of letting the girls out. It was a brisk 9°F, but there was no wind. Unfortunately, the gate was frozen in the ground. As winter has progressed, we have gotten less and less of the post back in its holes, which is why it looks so far out of the ground.

Fence post firmly frozen in the ground

I tried a crowbar, which loosened the back prong, but I couldn’t get a good angle on the front. I borrowed a little piece of 2 x 4 from Terry to increase my leverage, but it didn’t help. So the girls stayed in. Hilda worked on it more later. Still it would not budge. This morning I took out an ice pick and some salt. I made a divot in the ice with the pick and filled it with salt. By the time I was done with the chores inside the coop, I was able to get the fencepost out of the PVC pipes. But it wouldn’t go back in. I put more salt in the pipes and poked with the ice pick until I could get the fencepost back in. By afternoon, I was able to get the post all the way into the ground.

I was feeling clever at doctoring Bianca in the storage side of the coop rather than setting up a cage and keeping her in isolation. There is a drawback, however. We have trained Bianca to expect treats. Hilda warned me before I went out. Bianca would do anything to get to the storage side of the coop. “You’d better take some buttermilk,” she suggested

“We need to stop enabling,” I replied.

I though maybe it was just because Bianca liked Hilda better, and maybe I wouldn’t have a problem. I was glad to see that she looked perfectly normal.

Bianca returns to normal

She didn’t seem particularly interested in escaping at first. Yet, when I turned around after hanging up the feeder, there she was next to the heater. She almost evaded me, but I got ahold of her tail to stop forward progress until I could pick her up. That little stinker!

Bianca made an escape to the storage side of the coop

Interestingly, since we had the really cold weather, Juanita has stopped pecking Lupita. I haven’t posted pictures of Lupita recently because she has had ugly bald spots all over her breast and back, and I was afraid you would think I was a bad chicken-mom. Thus you cannot appreciate how much better she looks now. 

Feathers growing back on Lutpita's breast and neck

Here is a close up of her back by the tail that clearly shows the shafts of the new feathers.

Shafts of new feathers growing at the base of Lupita's tail

We watch the weather forecasts anxiously, looking for an opportunity to get the rest of the ice off the driveway. Sooner or later, I remind myself, spring will come. Sooner or later…