Dear Family,
About a year ago I bought a 50-pound bag of ice melt, emptied it into one of those giant white buckets from the bishops’ storehouse, and tucked it away in a seldom-trafficked corner of our basement, thinking it could very well last the rest of my life.
I’ve probably used about half of it since I wrote last month’s letter. For all of the past month, the bucket has sat just inside our front door, its contents slowly dwindling. There came a moment last week when I thought it might be time to move it back down the basement.
And then it snowed again.
I’m leading this letter with the weather only because of the notable (and disruptive) role it played in so much of everything we did this month.
Winters around here are generally fairly tame. It gets cold, but not that cold. We get snow, but not a lot and not often. I don’t know the statistics and I’m too lazy to look them up, but it’s fair to say that most years we get “a little” snow. Sometimes we don’t get any, but we usually get at least a few inches here and there. A six-inch snowstorm is a fairly big deal and, depending on the timing, will almost always result in at least a one-, possibly two-day school closure.1 This inevitably draws eyerolls from people who hail from snowier climes. Thirty years2 of living in the D.C. area have taught me that there are actually some fairly compelling reasons for shutting things down around here for a little while after modest snowfalls, but I won’t get into those now.
Every 15 years or so, though, we get a blockbuster — so much snow (two feet or more) that it buries us for a week or longer. This month’s storm (I’m calling it “this month’s storm” even though it was technically the last week of January) was challenging not because of sheer quantity of snow but because of the unique conditions surrounding it.
We didn’t actually get that much snow. Let’s say six to ten inches, depending where you were. A pretty big deal for us but not in itself crippling. Two immediately subsequent events made it crippling: 1) the several inches (3 to 5 inches, maybe(?)) of sleet and freezing rain that fell on top of the freshly fallen snow, and 2) temperatures that didn’t get above freezing for three weeks.
Clever people quickly dubbed the resulting mixture of snow, water, and ice “snowcrete” — a fitting name for a substance that was utterly impossible to deal with. For two weeks you could walk across the glazed surface of it — as if it were a frozen pond — without any fear of your foot going through it. Trying to clear it with a conventional snow shovel resulted in neighborhood streets littered with busted snow shovels. I needed to retrieve our metal gardening tools — my garden shovel and edger — to hack through the frozen top layer. But those were both in our backyard shed, which had been sealed shut by the accumulated snowcrete.
I eventually battled my way into the shed to retrieve the requisite tools. But once you were fortunate enough to break through the surface and scoop the snowcrete, you still had to move it. And because there was so much water in it, it was orders of magnitude heavier than you might imagine that much snow could possibly weigh. A rule of thumb is that 1 inch of rain contains the moisture equivalent of 10 inches of snow. Well, this was nearly 10 inches of snow with another couple inches of rain packed inside of it. It was like shoveling 3 feet of snow (and, yes, I lived here in 2010 (or 2011 or whenever that was) and I know what that’s like).
Compounding all this was a wave of historically cold temperatures. As I wrote earlier, it gets cold here, but not that cold and not for that long. Highs in the 30s and lows in the 20s are par for the course, but we would consider those cold days. Occasionally (at night) we get down into the teens, but not often, and single digits are rare. Usually after a couple of cold days we can count on a respite up in the 40s or higher. We almost never get more a handful of consecutive days that don’t break the freezing mark.
We had almost three consecutive weeks of such days. You don’t understand — that never happens here. We didn’t crack 32 for like 18 days or something, and the snowcrete went absolutely nowhere. It just kept getting harder.
Most of the snow (and ice and rain) fell on Sunday, Jan. 25th. Even before the storm had passed, it was announced that there would be no school on Monday or Tuesday. On Tuesday, it was announced that there would be no school on Wednesday or Thursday. On Thursday, it was announced that there would be no school on Friday. On Sunday, they announced no school on Monday. After delayed openings on Tuesday and Wednesday, schools finally opened on time on Thursday, February 5th — 11 days after the storm.
It’s not that we don’t have snowplows. We do. Our little neighborhood street was plowed and passable on Monday morning (the first Monday morning — Jan. 26th). The problem is that the plows (for lack of a better phrase and pardon my French) do kind of a half-assed job — just enough for people to be able to get in and out. Typically this works just fine. Under most circumstances, it would be a waste of time/resources for the plows to do a “whole-assed” job because you can usually count on a couple of 50-degree days in fairly short order to help clean up the residual mess.
The 50-degree days never came. Neither did any 40-degree days. We would have been happy with some 30-degree days, but we didn’t really get any of them either. And so the streets, while passable, remained problematic, and the sidewalks were effectively unusable. On many main roads, the plows simply pushed the mountains of snow and ice from the roadway onto the sidewalk. And in the neighborhoods, many residents were incapable of dealing (or unwilling to deal) the snowcrete. When only 80% of the sidewalks are clear, then they might as well not be clear at all. And even where sidewalks were entirely clear, pedestrians still had to climb over mountains of plowed snow at intersections just to cross the street.
Consequently, there was no way to get anywhere other than by car. Walking was unsafe (not that that prevented me from getting my appointed runs in — cars, cold, and ice don’t deter me!) and children couldn’t wait for the school bus without having to stand in busy streets. So, while missing all that school seems kind of absurd, I sort of understand the bind they were in.
Anyway, last week finally brought some warmth and this past Friday, for the first time in four weeks, I was able to ride my bike to work using the trail through Rock Creek Park (rather than having to contend with the cars on Rock Creek Parkway, which I did during the two previous weeks).
The clear trails lasted all of two days because it snowed again this past Sunday. Just a few inches, but enough to close schools again on Monday.
Unless the county can get some sort of waiver from the state, Crystal’s last day of teaching school this year is now scheduled for Monday, June 28th.
So that’ll be interesting.
Incidentally, today marks one month since the snowcrete fell. In that month I have logged 143.2 running miles (all outside — I prefer frostbite to the treadmill), 160.7 cycling miles (mostly outside — 20 or so on the Peloton), and 22.0 miles in the pool (mostly inside — only 5 miles or so in the outdoor pool, which closes when the air temp is below freezing).
But if the outdoor pool is open, then I’m in it, falling ice warnings notwithstanding:
Gracie!
I’m designating our quick President’s Day jaunt down to visit Grace at Southern Virginia University as this month’s highlight.
The hardest part of visiting SVU is the lack of any Marriott properties within 30 miles of campus. This means we have to pay for lodging using actual cash money, which I guess isn’t that big a deal, but it still annoys me. With no lodging to speak of (Marriott or otherwise) in SVU’s small town of Buena Vista3 we opted to stay in the neighboring community of Lexington, Va. Downtown Lexington is home to Washington & Lee University, the Virginia Military Institute, I think two traffic lights, three churches (all of which I have visited) and a seemingly infinite supply of small-town charm.
Ari, Crystal, and I stayed at a century-old Main Street hotel now called “The Gin.” It was the Robert E. Lee Hotel until 2020. Actually, except for all the stuff named after Stonewall Jackson, just about everything in Lexington was named for Robert E. Lee until 2020. Now, with the exception of the (privately owned) Washington & Lee University, the town has managed to sandblast the two Confederate generals’ names off of just about everything, though you can still kind of see the remnants of Lee’s name on the awning in front of The Gin. (I really couldn’t care less about any of this — to quote my father, “I have a fairly healthy disinterest in the Confederacy” — but I do find it amusing.)
But it’s a charming little place and I recommend it if you ever find yourself needing to spend the night in Lexington, Virginia. They recently renovated all the guest rooms but the elevator still has a vestigial crank from back when it needed to be operated by hand, and the lobby has phone booths that at least look like they’re from a hundred years ago.
We spent more time with Grace in Lexington than in Buena Vista. We had dinner at her favorite Thai place:
We also went with Grace to one of her favorite used book shops in Lexington (where her friend Matt works):
We also visited Trinity Episcopal Church, where Grace gets paid to sing in the choir.
We also got our first look at Grace’s latest apartment. It’s the basement of someone’s house, but it’s a walk-out, so it doesn’t feel like a basement. Lots of solid, natural light. Nice place and conveniently located to campus. I think she’ll probably live there next year (when she’ll be a senior(!)) too.
Grace has her hands full with school and her multiple jobs (including one as the music director for a local community production of School of Rock) but she seems to be holding it all together and, most important, seems genuinely happy.
I had time for one run in Lexington (which is really all you need to see the entire town). For the first couple of miles I ran alongside a friendly couple visiting from Nashville. I learned that they had lost power for 10 days — 10 days! — during the snowcrete storm. I didn’t feel like they were going to have much sympathy for my admittedly more trivial complaints about the state of Beach Drive and the Rock Creek Trail up in D.C., and so I didn’t bring it up.
But I did take some fun pictures while running through the VMI and W&L campuses:
The drive home took a little longer because we had to stop at the new (new to us — it opened back in July) Buc-ee’s just south of Harrisonburg. If you don’t live in the South and are unfamiliar with Buc-ee’s, it’s basically what Wawa would look like if Wawa had been founded by a Texan — a cartoonishly large, 74,000-sq-ft convenience store with 120 gas pumps, surprisingly immaculate restrooms, extraordinary barbecue, top flight fudge and cinnamon rolls, and countless other things I haven’t tried yet.
Grace doesn’t like Buc-ee’s. She thinks it’s too crowded. I love her, but she is mistaken. Buc-ee’s is awesome.
I’m just sorry I didn’t take a picture. Next time!
bell hooks
I turned 54 shortly after posting last month’s letter. One more year until I can finally buy that place in Leisure World I’ve had my eye on!
For my birthday I got to meet noted third-wave feminist author bell hooks.
I didn’t technically meet her — bell hooks died in 2021.
But as evidence that my oldest daughter still loves me and has not yet lost all hope for me, Hannah sent me for my birthday a copy of The Will to Change by bell hooks. (She reportedly felt that rendering her name in all lowercase helped to draw more attention to her work than to her personal identity. I would argue that stylizing one’s name unconventionally actually accomplishes precisely the opposite of that, but what do men know about anything?)
Hannah’s thoughtful birthday present was a follow-on to her Christmas present: Men Explain Things to Me by a fourth-wave feminist author named Rebecca Solnit. I was familiar neither with this author nor with the fact that there even existed a fourth wave of feminism. I sort of knew about the first three. My confusion may stem from the fourth wave having launched while the third wave is still rolling and the substantial overlap between the two. Based on having read precisely one author and one book from each wave, I gather that while both schools are obsessed with laying every last one of society’s ills squarely at the feet of the patriarchy, third wave feminists still love us (men) and hold out hope that we can be healed from our innate toxic masculinity. The fourth wave does not seem burdened by any such illusions and views us as largely irredeemable.
While I’m skeptical of anyone who professes to understand the inner workings of my mind better than I do, I am nevertheless drawn to people who seem genuinely interested in helping me become a better person. As I believe this to be bell hooks’s sincere intent, it makes me want to listen to her. If hooks (and the one book of hers that I have read) is a fair representation of third-wave feminism, then third-wave feminism would seem to be largely compatible with the gospel.4 The objective is for all of us to become better by loving each other more perfectly. That strikes me as an ideal that people of goodwill everywhere ought to be able to get behind.
The fourth wave, in contrast, assuming that Men Explain Things to Me is a fair representation of it, which it may not be, is just new and innovative ways of complaining about old problems that everyone already knows about. I don’t need someone to explain to me all the nuanced ways in which I’m flawed — I already know I’m flawed. I think the old adage applies here: no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Solnit (the author) knows a lot but plainly does not care about me. She’s just an angry person who wants others to appreciate and share in her anger. That is not in any way compatible with the gospel. In fact, it’s the opposite of it.
It’s also possible that I’m entirely wrong about literally all of this. Above all, I just want Hannah to know that I love her and that I read the books she sends me.
Two Chili Cook-offs
Our neighborhood civic association hosted a chili cookoff on Sunday and Ari, being Ari, participated. Because our neighborhood is nothing if not inclusive, the event was billed as a “Chili/Curry Cookoff,” which is lovely and all, but Ari reports that only one of the entries was a curry. Ari didn’t win but they got a nice little participation medal and had a fun time.
The evening before, all of us attended the Olney Ward Chili cookoff and barn dance. Grant and I were in the band, which consisted almost exclusively of people from our ward and Olney (our neighbor to the north). I’m not sure how you classify a band that includes two fiddles, a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, a banjo, an accordian, a bass, a piano, and a cajón, but we play a lot of different stuff and have a lot of fun.
Hope you’re having fun, too!
Love,
Tim et al
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- I have found a reasonably good rule of thumb is to take the number of inches of snowfall, divide by four, and that’s roughly how many days of school you can plan to miss. It’s not perfect, but it gets you in the ballpark
- 37 years if you count the birth-thru-first-grade years of my life before we moved to the South Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, which is still where I think of myself as being “from”
- Say it with me: “Byoon-uh Vista” — Don’t say it in Spanish; you’ll irritate the locals. If you’re a Spanish speaker and this annoys you, think of how annoying it’s been for a Francophile like me to have to force-mangle Coeur d’Alêne, Idaho (to say nothing of Boise, which is even worse — literally the only letter in Boise that Idahoans pronounce correctly is the ‘B’) for the past 32 years.
- Feminists seeking to rid the world of “toxic masculinity” would probably approve of our religious desire to overcome the “natural man,” the drawbacks of which are plainly spelled out in both ancient (e.g., Mosiah 3:9) and modern (e.g., Doctrine & Covenants 121:34-40) scripture and, while not necessarily unique to men, bear many of the hallmarks of “toxic masculinity.”