By Esther Baird. First Published in the Tri Town Transcript Mar 21, 2018
Some of you may recall the column I wrote a few years back about the time my husband insisted we get a whole-house generator. I huffed and thought it was a waste of money, but then had to write that I was wrong and he was right. And three years later, he was still so exceedingly right.
But despite the generator, which has purred away like the house cat we will never have, March of 2018 has inflicted permanent trauma from the last three storms.
(Dear future self, as I write this there have only been three. If there is a fourth by the time this goes to print, you can find me in the basement… where we store the wine.)
All of the shoveling and tree disasters and near-death experiences with whatever lurks below the Tri-Town’s polar cap served only to highlight weekly, when trash day rolls around, that we can’t be that smart if we live here.
Trash day, for us, falls on a Tuesday, the day that the third storm was forecasted to strike. But we’re New Englanders, a little blizzard doesn’t shut us down. So Monday afternoon in a fit of pre- emptive energy and snowstorm preparedness, we hauled our trash out.
Then I read a few hours later that, actually, a blizzard can shut us down, and the trash was being delayed ’til Wednesday. Fine. I may have rolled my eyes, but I hauled it back into the garage and tried not to feel annoyed. I like to save my trash annoyance for those times I’m standing out at the curb at 5:45 a.m. in the dark listening to coyotes and realizing that I’m out of trash stickers. It’s the suburban kiss of death.
Plus, bear with me, but it’s 2018 and we use stickers?? I can be on the other side of this, our spinning planet, and remotely turn my house lights on or set the temperature, but come trash day it’s like a throw-back to my 1984 grade-school stickerbook collection. I guess I’m not the cool kid with the rainbow scratch-and-sniff stickers because for whatever reason, though I buy $10,000 of stickers at a time, I am always out of them when it’s cold and dark and I’m running late.
At any rate, Tuesday morning we were buried beneath a glacier. Whatever. Three weeks in a row of extreme weather — but I wasn’t counting. No, not this mom with two tweeny teens who had run out of ways they could be civil to, say, even a lamp. Did we watch a few movies? Indeed we did. I shoveled, and it kept snowing. So that also annoyed me, and then we went to bed.
Wednesday morning, I got up and shoveled enough to clear our garage, and then hauled the trash back down to the street, through the plowed but still treacherous, post-storm blight. We had an appointment out in the world that was not “the jackpot” zone, so we left. But when we came home, our trash was still there, while other people’s trash was gone.
It was as if I had missed getting it out in time. Which, I guess, if they came before I was plowed out at 7 a.m., is possible, except, no, it’s not. Were people hauling trash through 2 feet of snow then? Burrowing perhaps? Catapulting? Or is it possible that my trash was hidden behind the Egyptian pyramid of snow at the end of my driveway or, perhaps, the pile of felled trees?
There’s no blame here. It was crazypants out there, and unless they started using trash drones, which, given we’re using peel-off stickers, seems unlikely, then it was bound to be an imperfect collection day.
But, I’m not moving it. I am not hauling it one more time. I have had it with this winter, and this is where I say no more. It’s out there and it’s be-stickered. I don’t care if there is a fourth storm looming. This round of trash can get fossilized like a woolly mammoth beneath the permafrost only to be resurrected by future scientists to study as an example of the life of an early-21st- Century mother who had Absolutely Lost Her Ability To Be Calm About Winter.
Sometimes my husband thinks I can get overly dramatic about things — too emotionally worked up by a given situation. But he’s wrong. This time, I’m sure I am right.