[Editor’s Note: We are thrilled to report that, after a lengthy hiatus, Our Alex, longtime essayist for the newspaper, is back.]
Dateline Boston — April 2015. I’m gonna call it now and say that winter is over. Yes, the calendar says it was over on March 20. This is Boston. Sometimes it snows in April.
The winter season started out uneventfully. It was so uneventful, I texted my uncle who lives in California and told him so. “Not much snow here…” Little did I know that in a few short days, I would eat my words. It happened on Tuesday, Jan. 27. Blizzard. School was closed that day and the next. The rest of the week was spent cleaning up.
Then it happened again, the next Monday and Tuesday. People lost their minds, saying enough snow! I posted a rant on Facebook: “People calm down! It’s winter! It snows in Boston! Happens every year!” I ate my words again the next week. For three weeks in a row, school was cancelled on Monday and Tuesday due to the snow. More snow was dumped on our fair city in that time span than ever had been recorded. I began sending Uncle California daily pictures of Snowmaggedon.
It didn’t stop snowing, and then it got cold. Below freezing cold. Negative digits cold. When I lived in Japan many years ago, I taught at a junior high school. Every day, vendors would stop in at the teachers room to sell various items to the teachers. Sometimes it was packs of energy drinks, sometimes local produce. One time a guy came in selling winter jackets with matching snow pants. They were very inexpensive, so I bought them. I never did use them in Japan, but I’ve worn them lots of times in Boston, and this winter I have worn them almost every day since Jan. 27. I thanked God many times a week for those snowpants.
I’ve been outside in every snow event we’ve had this year. One week I was cat sitting. I walked through a blizzard to feed that cat, who was blissfully unaware. I went to work. I’m a nanny who lives 15 minutes away from the family I work with, so every day I’ve walked the route to my job and back, through the snow, slush and ice. If Mom and Dad are working, so am I.
Maybe you can’t imagine what it’s like to walk through two or three feet of snow. Sometimes paths are cleared, either with a snowblower or a shovel. Sometimes there are no paths. Sometimes you walk down a path to discover that it just stops. You’re forced to walk in the street. Sometimes there’s a driving ban. Sometimes there’s not. When there’s not, you have to be very careful about how you walk. You risk getting hit by a car, or worse, by a snow plow.
The corners are the worst. Many times I’d walk down the street and come to a corner, only to find a mound of snow four or five feet high. Most of the time, people have walked over it. I literally walked in their footsteps. So I had to balance one foot in a footprint, then step over with the other. When I landed, I’d often be in the street, so I’d have to pray that a car wasn’t coming at that particular moment.
A few blocks away from my house, someone did a nice job of snowplowing a narrow path for people to walk on. Only problem was, it was just wide enough for one person. A bunch of us commuted down the street in a line one morning. I said to the man behind me, “We’re like rats in a maze.” He replied, “If I got a piece of cheese at the end of this, I’d be happy.” We have to keep our sense of humor these days, or else we’d lose our minds.
We broke the record of snowfall this winter. On March 15, we hit 108.6 inches of snow, making this the snowiest season on record. The snow is gone now, although you can still see patches of it here and there if you really look. I guess it’s spring. And in a couple of days, it will be summer. And then people will complain about the heat. When I moved to New England over 20 years ago, someone said to me, “If you don’t like the weather here, wait a minute, it will change.” How right he was. Wonder how much snow we’ll get next year?
Ms. Vaillancourt may be contacted at snobbyblog@gmail.com
