Cats Having Fun in the Snow

I’d love to get a bit of snow! Day after day of rain and grey sky is getting me down. Just four inches or so–I’m not greedy. We also get a nice show from the squirrels whenever it snows.

I know what you mean. Gray skies don’t work for me. I spent my childhood in the upper Midwest, and my family moved to Colorado when I was 14. Much like John Denver’s lyrics: ‘I was born in the autumn of my 15th year, coming home to a place I had visited just a handful of times before’.

The oppressive gray skies were uncommon in Colorado, but we still had snow, which typically would last for 2-3 days, and then the grass would be visible again. The first December we spent there was a bit shocking, when we saw kids riding the bikes they had received as gifts on Christmas Day. In the northern tier states, a Christmas present of a bike was a cruel gift, because there would be 3-4 months before it could be ridden.

My favorite Colorado snow memory was an autumn storm which had brought Denver to a near standstill on an October Friday. It was midday before I had shoveled the west half of my driveway, and could get my pickup out and slog my way through the snow packed streets to the supermarket As with every snowstorm, the bakery section was all but empty of product, when I got there. The next morning, I shoveled the east side of my driveway, where my Mustang lived, but by then the Chinook winds had arrived, so I was shoveling in flip-flop sandals, shorts and a T shirt, racing to move snow before it melted. Only in Denver.

My current desert digs are placed under skies that are blue at least 95% of the time. You haven’t experienced desert life until you find yourself vainly throwing rocks at the Sun. (There is no shortage of rocks where I live. I suspect that the rocks here are a strange form of plant life, which replenish themselves with a fresh crop, annually. Most of my lawn mowers die of a bent crankshaft, when a rock sneaks up and strikes the blade.)

Snow is not unknown here, and my home is at about 4,300’ MSL, not much lower in elevation than Denver. So it’s not unusual to have snow at my house once or twice a year, but it is very short lived. My favorite Arizona snow memory was six of seven years ago, when I was raining steadily in Tucson. Because of the flatness of my workplace, steady rain could close the roads for hours, and my right hand man suggested that I bug out early, especially in view of the fact that I drove a very low-slung sports roadster at the time, with wide tread tires that loved to aquaplane.

As I drove home, and elevation increased, I started encountering snow, and by the time I got to my neighborhood, there was about 4” of snow, which meant that my car barely cleared the level of the snow in the center of the road. I have a lot of experience, driving in snow, but it was all I could do to maintain momentum as those big, wide, sports car tires didn’t dig in deep enough to contact the pavement. By the time I reached my driveway, I was barely moving, but I managed enough momentum to get the car far enough into the driveway to clear the street, with perhaps 10’ between the back bumper and the public roadway. There was no way to get it further due to the uphill grade of my driveway, so I left it there.

The next morning, I woke up early and most of the snow had melted. My car had slid a few feet streetward, but was now on solid ground, so I drove it up to its normal parking place, without incident. Chances are that I had the top down, by the time I left work, that afternoon. This is life in the West.