Promises made while snowbound in Rim Country

Photo by Jim Keyworth

By Sunday morning, an innocent beauty had returned to Mesa del Caballo.

Today, Sunday, the sun came out and our Rim Country blue sky returned. The deluge of the past few days has transformed into a pristine and innocent winter scene.

After the year that precipitation forgot – my humble gauge received a grand total of 14.3 inches for all of 2009 – we were swamped, inundated, drenched, immersed, engulfed and overwhelmed by rain, sleet, snow and innumerable gradations of the three. Then, for good measure, Mother Nature stirred in a dose of heavy winds.

In less than a week, Mesa del Caballo received 9.7 inches of precipitation – a total that we didn’t reach in 2009 until Sept. 2. I’m relying on a neighbor’s rain gauge for that total. Mine shattered, no match for the storm.

However you spent the last few days, they will probably not soon be forgotten – if only because they were so out of the ordinary. The Consort and I won’t. Thanks to flooding, two feet of snow, a power outage that lasted half a day, and a fallen tree branch blocking our cars, we were pretty much confined to the house and yard.

Part of the time we spent making sure we were ready for whatever happened next. Flashlights charged, batteried and locatable, candles and matches primed and ready. Those press releases from the Red Cross about being prepared had an impact.

Dry firewood was one area where I slipped, however. I had let the in-house supply dwindle because I was in the middle of painting the living room and the wood box next to the fireplace would have to be moved. Besides, my woodpiles outdoors were safely covered with tarps.

Enter the wind, which blew off several tarps. But I did eventually manage to find some relatively dry wood and hauled it inside.

Then it was time to take care of that most vital creature comfort. The last time a storm of this magnitude happened with accompanying power outage some 10 years ago, the biggest flaw in my emergency preparedness was not having any instant coffee in the house, much less a pot to put in the fireplace that I didn’t really care about ruining.

Not being a cowboy coffee maker, we drank tea during that three day outage. You don’t really know how much coffee means to you until you can’t have any – for three days.

After that storm, I bought two jars of instant coffee and put them in two different places. And I dug our camping coffee pot out of storage and gave it a position of prominence inside the house.

But 10 years is a long time. I found the coffee pot without too much trouble, but the two jars of instant coffee – finding them took a little longer. They somehow ended up together in the back of the pantry. For companionship I guess. Coffee mating.

You can say what you want about your fancy gourmet coffees. I have to tell you that 10-year-old instant coffee in water heated in the fireplace was absolutely the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted.

So reinforced, the digging out began. Thursday night’s snow amounted to about a foot, plus whatever the county snowplow piled on top of that.

We finally got through to the street, but there was still the matter of the fallen branch behind the cars. As we started to work on digging the branch out, I happened to look up at the carport roof.

I made an executive decision that it was more important to reduce the snowload on the carport than it was to get the tree branch moved. We wouldn’t be going anywhere Friday night.

On Saturday, I had to re-dig the driveway, thanks to another foot of snow and another visit by the snowplow guy. And then there was still the tree branch, buried under the new snowfall and the snow I had thrown on it from the carport roof. Talk about trying to pick up hay you’re standing on.

We finally dug out and moved the branch by around dusk on Saturday, but by then we were too tired to go anywhere. There is, however, a measurable degree of comfort in being able to get out when you couldn’t.

Meanwhile back inside, between power outages and internet problems, I tried to keep blog readers as updated as I could. It’s amazing how absolutely addicted we are to our computers.

The Consort managed to read a complete, if short book. My LDS friends will be happy to know it was “Secret Ceremonies – A Mormon Woman’s Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond” by Deborah Laake. I didn’t ask her for all the secrets – just a couple.

The Arizona Republic driver couldn’t get out to Mesa del for a couple days, so I read some poetry and a few magazine articles. The Consort says I have become incapable of holding still long enough to read an entire book. She might be right.

At one point, I was inspired to write a poem. But between the inspiration and the time and place to write it, I lost it. Poetry, more than any endeavor I know, works that way. When the muse strikes, you must stop and write or forever lose the inspiration.

But speaking of losing, I did lose a couple pounds shoveling snow and I also got the living room painted. Besides having to move the wood box, I had to move and put back about a gazillion books – many of which I was waiting for just such a weekend to read.

So my promise for the next storm is to remember where the instant coffee is and to remember what a great bunch of books are waiting on the bookshelves.

Next time, I promise to take advantage of these rarest of opportunities to live life the way we used to live it back before computers and other insanities made us forget what is important – and how to relax.

I promise.