Six below and windy. Yikes! We’ve been having quite the winter weather. The last week has been a good one for staying indoors. Or so I hear. Rascal himself never checks the thermometer. No number that might appear there would present an obstacle to his outdoor perambulations. His built-in fur coat keeps the cold off his body. His innate optimism keeps him good to go.
That just leaves his paws. I tried some doggy booties on him once. He offered no objection, but they fell off as soon as he moved. They wouldn’t snug up around his legs well enough to stay on his feet. Rascal’s paws are definitely the weak link in the whole let’s-go-for-a-walk rigamarole.
That’s because everywhere around is now covered with ice and snow. Ergo, people have put snow-and-ice-melting stuff on the walks. Chunks of it. Rare among manufacturers is one that produces a melting product that is kind to dogs’ paws. The rest all turn it out in pointy pieces that could not have been better designed to lodge in dogs’ paws.
The painful bits quickly prevent Rascal from being able to use all his paws, and he pulls up lame until such time as someone removes a glove to get at the sharp debris. It gets firmly wedged in there, and bits of ice and snow hold it in place. So, although Rascal is primed for the weather I, as his paw-cleaner, am less so. Even the hand warmers I use in bitter cold can’t keep up with how cold my hands get every time I need to clean the dog’s paws when the wind chill is well into the negative double digits. Hence, we’ve been going for short walks. Rascal doesn’t approve, but neither one of us has fur on our paws, and I’m bigger than he is.
My husband and I ran one last errand before the weather-advisory weather arrived last Friday–to REI to replace the cleaty things I wear on my boots, as had disappeared in that morning’s walk. Technology has come a long way since the last time I shopped for traction improvers. They’re now called microspikes, and they are awesome. The kind I got has three different systems for gripping various surfaces. They’ve been great at snow, ice, sidewalks, trails—everything we have. My feet now feel empowered.
This makes it possible for me to look around while we walk. When snow isn’t falling, the sun has been shining. The winter show has been not only beautiful but a bit arty. Tree trunks are now sporting vertical stripes of spiked snow. Whether this is happening on the windward or leeward sides of the trees isn’t clear, as the wind has come from various quarters. But the columns of snow look like nothing so much as roached manes to me, as if the trees may go strutting off at any time, necks proudly arched.
The neighborhood children are enjoying playing in the white stuff. Footprints on the sidewalk a couple days ago showed that some child with a plastic sled had ridden it down every driveway in the court. There isn’t much of an incline there, but driveways are close to home, and with the temperature as low as it’s been, that matters. The little girl across the way slid down her front lawn, over and over. Again, not much of a slope, but the distance from home was just right.
Children have also been addressing their pent-up need to build snowmen. The quality of the snow has been just right, and there’s a lot of it to work with. One household made a whole snow family—two adults and two children. Our New Yorker cartoon-a-day calendar for today shows a woman chatting to two snowmen in her yard. The cartoonist, Emily Flake, has the woman saying to the snowmen, “I’m so glad it snowed. I haven’t socialized this much in months!”
The children down the block built my favorite snowman. It’s tall and robust, and it sports a great big blue-and-yellow pompom on top of its head, either as a wig or as extravagant ornamentation to a snow hat. Who can say? The snowperson is cheerful, too. Of course, pretty much everyone in Ann Arbor is cheerful these days, as our own dear University of Michigan just won the national collegiate football championship.
How can you tell the snowman is cheerful? The children who built it have searched the house and yard to give it everything it needs. It has button eyes, arty arms made of multiply-twigged sticks, and a long, gently curving stick gives it a sweet smile. Go Blue!
19 January 2024