T + 3 and counting

Well it snowed today. As I write we have two feet of the stuff and it’s still coming down heavily. So , despite the wife being 9 months and 3 days pregnant (term + 3 and counting) she yet again had to ride the snow plough behind the car to clean the road. Before anyone, mother, says I shouldn’t have let her, I must point out that we don’t really have much choice as the male neighbours in the area who could help out, don’t; in fact as we pulled over one had the nerve to drive past, again, smiling pleasantly. My wife is as feminine as she comes but she got more balls than most of the men round here put together. I have nothing but admiration for her.

Anyway, we usually use the tractor to clear the snow but as we found out that the Kia pulls just as well as the tractor we load the howler into her child seat (which is much warmer) and stand the wife on the deck of the plough (which isn’t) clinging onto the spare wheel and off we go. We have to clean the snow because there’s no way, in case she starts having contractions, that we can walk her down through the woods to get to the car and there’s no way I’m going to carry her, for love or otherwise and if the snow gets up to 3 feet even the Kia is going to have problems. However, we got beaten this evening, snow 1 woozles 0. At a foot and a half we had to put the snow chains on (the Kia is absolutely amazing). We did a few trips to the tarmac and back this afternoon and again this evening hoping it would stop snowing before Laura had to go down to Turin (she has an early appointment to get the baby monitored or whatever they do) but we did a final trip down without pulling the plough driving through 20 cm of snow despite having ploughed it only and hour and a half before.

After waving them off on their long and arduous trip to Turin, because we can’t risk having the car at the house with nobody to help me to plough all night, I parked at the bottom of the woods and walked home or rather waded home up across the field and through the woods getting dumped on most of the way by the trees shedding their snow. It really was quite lovely, though a bit nerve-racking expecting branches to fall at any moment instead of snowdumps.

Life’s oddities never cease to amaze me. I love the weirdities of things and just preparing a bag for me in case of a midnight dash was obviously a little too boring for the gods. So now I have just finished preparing snowshoes, trekking poles, head torches, waterproofs and so on. Life’s cute ain’t she? So if the call comes sometime tonight it’ll be a swift bit of snowshoeing down to the car, a quick change out of my ski suit and, snow chains whanging against the wheel arch, off down to turin too. How romantic. Milk Tray anyone? I can just imagine taking a picture of the newly born infant howling at the world with dripping snowshoes propped up in a corner of the delivery room.

So all in all it’s been an unusual and interesting week. and seeing the weight of snow that is still falling things are going to get even more interesting overnight.