at 7:15 a.m. yesterday I pulled Penny the Prius out of her snow fort in the back yard (see the last two posts) for the first time in a couple of weeks. I-66 through Fairfax and Manassas was a salt-rimed desert bordered by mountains of snow as tall as, and dirtier than, those Penny left behind in D.C.
Visiting Moriah in Hollins, Jessie and Steve in Roanoke, and Lila and her daughters in Danville didn't feel like much of a climate change, pardon the expression. Everything was white though the piles weren't as deep. The last five hours of driving to Georgia were mostly at night; I arrived in Lincolnton at 10:30. Penny's readout of the outside temperature hardly varied from 37° all day long.
So here's what greeted me this morning. If you don't live in DC you may not realize that most winters we see bare ground all winter long; some recent winters Bob Ryan the weatherman hasn't been able to award the Golden Snowshovel to the viewer who guessed the date of the first significant snowfall because there was none. Nonetheless, no joke, today I look at this scene with the hungry eyes that I had when the first patches of earth appeared in Duluth (was it in April or May?) after four months under a wintry blanket when I lived there in the early 1970s.
In case you're wondering, yes, that's a graveyard. When Ellen and Jim bought this house it came with a historic burial plot, no extra charge. They keep it mowed and tidy. Kind of nice.
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