seasoning
Things really got interesting the morning my toilet froze.It had started with a thin sheet of ice on the surface of the water in the bowl. But by morning it was solid. Not just the water in the bowl but also the water in the tank – frozen into one big block with the black plastic buoy suspended in the center.
We are having a cold snap in Portland. I didn’t worry much about this kind of cold when I got my woodstove. We don’t usually have this kind of cold. When I say that, I don’t mean that we have it only once or twice a winter. What I mean is that years and years go by, decades even, without Portland seeing a temperature in the teens. We are in a valley between mountains. We are wet, but we are temperate.
Once in a while it will snow. It will snow weakly and unconvincingly and the flakes will melt on contact, leaving the same wet pavement we all expect from November to May. Snow on the ground is something Portlanders drive east for.
This year, though, it started falling fast the week before Christmas, and then it just kept falling. A dusting and then an inch and then more than we knew how to count, and it didn’t disappear. It covered our cars and our porch steps and our crosswalks and we stood around and stared. Because surely it couldn’t last.
Then the temperatures dipped to the twenties, and stayed there. Everyone was at a loss. We do not have plows in Portland. We don’t have salt trucks, because of the salmon. We don’t have snow tires. We wrapped ourselves up in puffy layers of outerwear, the likes of which I’ve never seen on the west coast. Where did all these coats and boots possibly come from? And we set out on foot, haltingly navigating to the store, smiling stupidly.
Portland Public Schools were closed for days. The mayor sent us home from work. Stores sold out of chains and windshield scrapers. Buses skidded out across intersections. The citywide transportation information hotline went dead.
And then my toilet froze. Oddly – luckily, perplexingly – my pipes did not burst. They did not burst even though some of them run uninsulated outside the house, and uninsulated in the crawl space, and uninsulated through my bathroom – which, when I am not home stoking a fire, is more or less the same temperature as my yard.
Did I mention yet that I ran out of wood? I was waiting on a load that fell through, and by the time I called around to order a new cord, the storm had hit. Increased demand and impassable roads made waitlists two weeks long. I fished out my space heater, and my wool socks. It’s not so bad, I think. People lived here for a long time without furnaces. My only concern came the morning I woke up to find my boots, abandoned the night before in the hall, still caked in snow.
Today, though, it seems to officially be coming to an end. Current precipitation is wholly liquid, and the ten-day sits squarely in the forties. Soon I will have a new load of oak and fir, and I will not make that particular procrastination mistake again. In the mean time I have a renewed appreciation for my hot water heater, and for fleece, and for flushing.
posted by tortaluga @ 3:57 PM
5 Comments:
but nobody to snuggle with... or is the Accidental Date still around?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?_r=1&hp
I sent that article to another friend yesterday when I saw it! Anon#2 should hyperlink. More elegant.
wow, so much anonymity!
that's a great article. (is this better?)
my house is kind of like that... but, you know, without the part where it stays warm and comfortable.
you're not allergic to wool, right?
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