Winter is Here

If it wasn't here already, winter is here now. A storm hit this morning and brought rain. This isn't the kind of rain that other places would call a heavy drizzle. It's the rain that you hear pounding on the roof and the sidewalk, so you go to the front door to be amazed as you watch it come down. And as you're standing there, you want to turn on the stove under the tea kettle. Or, rather, you would want to get the tea kettle going, if you hadn't forgotten about it last week and let it boil dry until the metal turned colors and it started flaking off inside the kettle, so the flakes come out when you pour the water, so now you're using a saucepan and ladle for making tea water, until you can remember to go buy a new kettle, which will lose the whistle shortly after purchase, just like the burned-up one did.

But it's winter, and the traffic report says there are accidents out there "too numerous to mention them all," because all the months without rain made the oils from all the cars build up. And now that we have rain, all that oil floats on top of the rainwater. It's not that people here don't know how to drive in the rain. It's that people don't know how to drive on an oil slick, and they miscalculate and then get into trouble.

But the rain had stopped before I left for work, so I didn't have an oil slick to drive on, and I got to work without incident.

As soon as the clouds clear away from the mountains in the distance, where people go skiing, the view should be breathtaking. I'm looking forward to it.