Sunday, December 18, 2005
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas….
Well with only a week left, It’s a pretty safe bet here, that that’s one dream coming true..
Last night the normally 80minutes drive back from Hiroshima, took over three hours. Visibility was at a minimum, and cars and trucks lay abandoned along the road, or half sticking out of ditches.
Twice we had to turn back and find a different route, as the ones we were driving became impassable, trucks without snow chains, stuck and immovable.
Still we struggled on.
Though it was freezing outside, sweat poured down my back through the sheer concentration of trying to keep the car on the road. Whenever it looked like it might be easing off, the snow would begin again harder and harder. If a tree had come crashing down and lying in the road there would have been no time to avoid hitting it. Most of the lights were out in the villages, and a strange eerie blackness filled the windshield in the thick white blanketed world we drove through. Familiar landmarks were counted down as they were passed, another step closer to home.
Finally, finally, we took the left turn off the road through our neighbouring village, nearly home, nearly home. You couldn’t see beyond the end of the car by now and I was driving by memory. Where was the bridge? As we crossed it, the snow was suddenly much deeper.
We were now swimming in snow.
It had been a crazy adventure, an exhilarating experience. How many times had we just laughed at the complete surrealness of it? But now at last we were nearly there. Just one last road to climb to home.
The steep, narrow, road lay buried in a small snow hill.
We paused, the snow was well over the wheels of the car, and halfway up the doors.
I aimed where I thought the road was and gunned the engine; the car lurched forward and began to climb, pushing the snow before it like a mini plough.
Suddenly the car began to slide sideways and then came to a stop. I tried forwards and then reverse, we both took turns trying to push it from either end, but our gallant little car was stuck, nothing left to do, but collect our things and walk.
We said a quick thankyou to the car and off we set, the snow was up to my hips. I felt like Good King Wenceslas as Nicky struggled behind me. It was so WHITE, beautiful, a real Winter Wonderland.
For thirty minutes we climbed, the same little road that we strolled around in the summer, coming back from a days swimming at the local elementary school pool, the same road that we took the bikes down to the shops. It was the same road, but how different it looked.
And then we see the house, dark, and lying under thick layers of white.
Home.
