palace of winds

Today as I was driving home, leaning way forward in an attempt to see out the narrow strip of clear windshield my snow-clumped wipers created, I contemplated the problem [and, on a side note, I had to use thesaurus.com to come up with 'problem', because I could think only of conundrum & felt it was too...highnmighty, to 'contemplate a conundrum']:

Leaning this far forward (thought I, squinting) means that were I to crash (slipping off the road or into another car, or another car into mine) there’s a quite high likelihood that my face and the windshield will become v. well-acquainted, and one or both may end up in pieces.

But:

Not leaning this far forward increases the likelihood that I will have the aforementioned slipping from and/or across the road, since then it is all guessworked based on the ways I remember the road turning, and how things look through the thick shifting smear of melt on my windshield.

It’s a fine line. And that fine line says Rachel, my dear, it’s time for the winter wipers.

I was disappointed I wasn’t able to take a picture of my car at work, before I swept it off, just to illustrate to Katie what a pile of snow on a car looks like. I tried to take a picture of my neighbor’s, but it was from the upstairs window through the summer screen we never removed, and so came out almost not at all:

My dog then kindly suggested he play the role of Abe’s car — i.e., dusted with snow. I’m not sure what illustrative purpose it served, except perhaps to show how much will accumulate on a dog after he’s been running around outside for a few minutes.