After Amy’s toothpaste comment on my last post, I thought I might compile a list of strange things that I actually have said in ordinary conversation. Alas, it has proved too difficult– lack of perspective, lack of memory, lack of definition of “strange.” Three lacks in a row means it’s a no go.
The Baltimore winter, however, is going strong, as it does every year. It starts with the salt boxes, which are squatty wooden boxes with hinged tops, about the size of a water cooler. They’re out on the street corners year round but near Thanksgiving they get filled to the tippy top with colored salt: pink, green, or blue. The salt is colored so that city workers can prove that they actually have salted the icy streets– “See, Hon? The street is pink!” The salt boxes don’t look like official city property; they look as if a bunch of eighth graders made them in wood shop, and then a bunch of preschoolers came along and painted them yellow, and then wrote “salt” on the front like this:
Then there are the roads. After the first one-inch snow storm the salt trucks and plows come out and salt and scrape the roads. It’s what I imagine the leather-tanning process to be, only the leather holds up better. After that first inch of snow, the holes start opening up in the roads. By mid-January there will be one or two holes in the neighborhood that are so big that someone will stick orange cones in them as warnings. You won’t be able to see the whole cone, just the top third. It will stay there until March or April.
So everyone is driving around dodging potholes, the flanks of their cars streaked with salt. One good thing about Baltimore is that, like me, most people don’t bother to wash their cars after every snowstorm. We are all gonna rust out together. I like that solidarity.
Though we are okay with the dangers of rust and salt, we are not okay with the dangers of weather forecasts. Yesterday the forecast was snow flurries, followed by rain, which may or may not freeze when it hits the ground. Close the schools, send everyone home early, stock up at the grocery store! Yep. The whole place closed down pretty much. False alarm, but you can’t beat a snow day. It starts with the window-rushing several times an hour at work. You get up from your desk and hurry to the window to examine first the clouds, then any visible precipitation, then the ground to “see if it’s sticking” (even if there is nothing falling from the sky). Then you speculate on the possible temperature at the moment, and how it might fluctuate through the afternoon. Then you check the website where your work tells you if you can leave early or not. Whenever someone without a window comes into your office to window-rush, you join them and repeat the whole process. Fun times.
When you leave work early you can see how the lawn ornaments of the city’s spirited inhabitants have fared. The Christmas decoration of choice around these parts is “the inflatable”, which has mixed sucess rates in standing up to snow, wind, and freezing rain. People add to their collections and each year cram another one out onto their postage-stamp row-house yard. Popular 8-foot inflatables, in addition to the traditional santas and snowmen, include Scooby Doo, Sponge Bob, and the Grinch. Here’s what Sponge Bob looks like:
Whenever I see a deflated Sponge Bob, I like to say, “O! How the mighty have fallen!” (If you are really charmed, you can get your own at buyinflatables.com)
The real must-have this season is the inflatable snow globe. It has the inflatable see-through bubble with a bunch of smaller inflatable creatures cheerily posed inside, and a little fan to blow “snow” around. It is a really weird experience to be standing out in an actual snowstorm, watching fake snow blow around inside a bubble in someone’s yard. I don’t know if this is a Baltimore thing, or if it has spread across the nation. I guessed I missed a lot by living in other countries or places without yards for the last several years.
Ah, winter.
