Here It Comes

I was out today running errands. When I returned to my car after one stop I buckled my seat belt and turned the key in the ignition. The car started right up. Instead of seeing the digital odometer on the display, I saw a different message. It was a message I had been dreading but tried to convince myself I would not see it for a while yet. It read, “ICEY CONDITIONS POSSIBLE. DRIVE CAREFULLY.” Really? Already? We just had Halloween. How can it be cold enough for that message to come on? Sure enough; I looked at the temperature gauge for outside and it read 28 degrees. Then a modest little snowflake glanced over my windshield on the edge of a frigid north wind. It did not stay long as it must have had others to tell its blustery news. I was instantly disheartened. Sure, it’s just one snowflake now and one cold afternoon. But I know what is coming. Soon there will be a “dusting” of snow on the driveway in the morning. Then you will go out to your car at the end of the day and have that half-inch of accumulation that has caught on the wiper blades and invited its friends to join it there. No big deal, right? Wrong! Next come the ice storms when your car and everything around are incased with ice. You cannot walk across a parking lot without slipping around. Workers start throwing salt on the sidewalks like grass seed on a lawn in the spring. You reach your car and find out it is entombed in ice and the doors are incapable of opening. (Remote car starters are a lifesaver at times like this. If all else fails, you can usually climb in through the trunk.) Forget the four wheel or all-wheel drive. This is ice you are dealing with and it is uncaring about such things. All you can do is pick the route home with the fewest hills and remember your winter driving lessons. Snow in and of itself is a wonderful thing. It is wonderful, that is, to look at through a window. Driving in it is the next phase of winter. The first accumulations are usually light and easily driven through. Soon come the snowstorms when you must go out. THEN it is nice to have the four wheel or all-wheel drive. The roads never seem to be plowed until you shovel your driveway and then the plow pushes new snow into the end of it, preventing your coming or going. And all of this started with a warning display on the dashboard and one flake of snow. It is no wonder Florida was created.