The snow, once fluffy and pristine, has melted and been packed down multiple times, every day and every night as the temperature hovers between 20° and 35°F. The mush in the road is a grimy, rutted, whipped-up mess of snow, ice, gravel, and de-icing chemicals (which as far as I can tell, didn't work). I want out of here, but not into that.Weak sunshine looks festive from my window, but the air outside is dry, brittle, and frigid. The roads are too slick for my little tin can Ford Focus—I fear gravity would take over if I tried to get down off this hill. It's too cold and slippery to walk down, a recipe for a broken hip. The good news: buses are running, albeit infrequently, because today is a holiday. But they are running. And that's a relief, because I am running out of food.
I wasn't built for this weather. I was made for warm, dry, sunny climes. I was made for California chaparral, Arizona cacti, dusty yards made of decorative rocks and desert flowers, blue skies and sunshine. My bones are rotting as I sit here with my feet buried inside a homemade foot warmer made of uncooked rice packed inside runnels sewed into an old pillowcase. After being microwaved umpteen times, the cotton is scorched. Today one of those scorched areas sprung a leak and a shower of tiny broken pieces of rice scattered across my desk and floor. I guess four minutes on high, every hour, is too much. I'll sew up the hole and try three and a half minutes, see how that goes.
I visited my car a couple days ago, just to make sure it was still there. It was, buried under a foot of snow, a car Popsicle. My brother warned me I should try to get the door open and start up the engine. Apparently batteries don't like cold weather any more than I do.
People in other parts of the country think we Portlanders are wimps and whiners. They are not wrong. Winter here rarely consists of more than rain, rain, and more rain. This big Arctic air bubble sitting over us happens from time to time, but it is rarely accompanied by a firehose of moisture. The last time I remember this much snow was almost ten years ago. I bought snowboots after that horrific experience. I dug them out of the back of the closet. That is how I blazed a path to my car.
I thought the weather would shift during the early morning hours tonight, but the NWS forecasters are now predicting freezing rain tonight and all day tomorrow. That means if I want to go get food, I will have to hike out or take the bus today, because once the freezing rain starts, the buses will stop running up here on the hill. My refrigerator is looking a bit bare, and my cat is starting to look oddly tasty.
When it starts raining, it is not expected to stop. In fact, temperatures may rise into the mid 40s on Wednesday. You know what that means, right? Oh, you don't? Well, it means that some of that snowpack in the mountains will start to melt, filling our local rivers and streams with a whole lot of water. Add to that the snow on the ground in Portland, clogged sewer grates, and saturated thawing ground and you get flooding and mudslides. The NWS has issued a flood watch. Luckily, I live on the shoulder of a hill. I am sure I won't get flooded. I am less sure that the road down the hill won't be subject to a small landslide or two. Unlikely. The trees that might have slid are mostly still lying in pieces in the parking strip after the previous ice storm.
I'm resenting weather today. I was hoping I would get out of here today (meaning, get my car out, drive to the store, see what is happening in the neighborhood), but it looks like that might not happen until Wednesday. I rarely am called to interact with this much weather. In an attempt to be grateful for my first-world problems, I tried to imagine what it would have felt like to be snowbound under nine feet of snow in Donner Pass. I'm sure I would not have survived. My ancestors who came from South Dakota and Wisconsin weren't wimps, but somehow over the generations, my ancestors' genes produced me, a hothouse flower with a built-in resentment against inclement weather. I'm so over winter.
