The Winter Storm Arrives

Well, the announcer on the weather radio was correct. There was winter weather on the way and it arrived as promised on time. I had been off work most of the week and the one day i was scheduled to work was the day the storm hit. It rained all night. I knew it was going to so i had parked the car under the oaks on the mulch pile. In the morning the ground was a chilly mud slush and i had to walk along the edge of the property in a big arc to use the grass as a path to get to the mulch pile. Very quickly i realized it was no longer raining. The sky was dropping ice balls by the thousands. They looked like dippin dots without colors. The temperature was 35 degrees Fahrenheit so they were not sticking to the ground but they stayed on the windshield long enough to start building little clumps. I turned on the defroster and drove with the windshield wipers on. It rained ice balls steadily for hours. As i drove through different elevations; hills and valleys, the car told me what temperature it was outside. I hit a spot where it read 32 and the ice balls seemed to get harder and less melty. They began sticking to the windshield and the wipers began making an audible sound as they scraped across the windshield. There was no moisture to lubricate them. The dippin dot rain became harder and i quickened the speed of the wipers. I was at a stop light. If i could just get going again i knew more of them would slide off before sticking to the windshield. Finally the light turned and i drove out of that cold spot back to where it was 35 again. By the time i arrived in town the car read 37 degrees. Though it was still raining ice balls they were melting on the windshield shortly after impact. It was somewhat relaxing to watch. I was very lucky to arrive as someone in a white truck was leaving and i got a spot near the building and didn’t have to park across town in the garage and walk. However, in attempting to get from the lot to the building i realized there was no path to the door that didn’t involve going through freezing water. I was picking my way across on tip toe when a car drove past at a high rate of speed, causing a tidal wave to form in the giant puddle i was standing in and that wave came up and over the front of my tennis shoes. The water was icy cold and brown. I stood still in my disappointment. I had been working so carefully to avoid what had just happened. I gathered myself and continued to the building. There was no down jacket to be worn. I wouldn’t have wanted it wet anyways. Our hoodies would have to do as they were the correct color and had the company logo on them. Also, the thin fabric didn’t restrict our movement the way a big coat would have and above all we had to be fast, so, off to work in our hoodies we went. I worked outside half of my 8 hour shift. It ended up snowing through most of it. Big fluffy flakes filled the air. It looked like time was suspended and restarted in slow motion. It looked like something out of a hallmark movie. I tried to keep my ball cap from blowing off my head and let the flakes alight on my hoodie as i ran the orders back and forth from the building to the cars. By the time my shift was over all the precipitation had stopped. I drove home an hour before the wet roads froze. The mailbox had some rain water/sleet in it for the chickens to drink. The plants had stayed covered. All in all it went pretty well, my first day working/driving during a winter storm. The following day would be above freezing and a whole bunch of people would have a closet full of bread, toilet paper, and jerky they weren’t sure what to do with. 🤦🏻‍♀️