Paint Me the Summer

We had a bit of weather last weekend.

I mentioned in my last post that it snowed from Saturday night all the way into Sunday, until the road was indistinguishable from the curb and the cars parked on either side of the one-ways looked like enchanted mushrooms. It snowed until it came up past my boots, and then it was nearly to my knees. The sheriff declared a Level One Snow Emergency: we were to use extreme caution while driving. This was irrelevant, as it was impossible to drive. And then he declared a Level Two Snow Emergency: no one was supposed to get on the road unless it was absolutely necessary. Again, this was irrelevant. And then he called a Level Three: no one was allowed to get on the road at all, except for emergency vehicles and plows. But I didn’t see a plow. The plows always save the one-way streets of LaBelle until last. Sometimes they don’t get to us until the snow melts.

When I finally went out for a walk, it was so bitterly cold that the snow did not crush when I stepped on it; it just sprayed out into the air. When I went back in, it was so dreadfully cold that we had to use both our space heaters in addition to the furnace to keep the house inhabitable. It was so impossibly cold that I opened the basement side door for the cat, who had been an outdoor cat her whole life and was shocked to be suddenly living underground, and she bounded up to it happily– and then cringed and bounded right back downstairs to safety.

At bedtime, I thought I could at least take refuge in a hot shower. But that was when the pipe at the back of the downstairs toilet exploded.

The toilet is in the laundry room, which used to be a porch but was enclosed at some unknown time before we rented the place. It’s the only room in the house that isn’t insulated for cold weather and barely has any heat coming out of the vent. We’d found icicles at the back of the toilet in the very beginning of the snow emergency and not even known where they came from. Now the entire pipe taking water to the tank had burst, and the floor was covered in freezing cold water. Michael and I ran to the basement to try and find the shutoff. The cat was at the top of the steps, desperately trying to warn us like Lassie. The basement ceiling was raining indoors. We ended up having to shut off the water for the whole house all night.

I don’t know how the landlord’s handyman managed to get up the road to our house. I only know that he was able to cap off the pipe at the back of the toilet and turn our water back on by noon, and then he was gone again.

Adrienne took all of Monday morning to excavate the drift with our Nissan somewhere underneath. Eventually, the car was standing in a dent in the snow pile, clear but unable to go anywhere. Nobody could go anywhere. The schools announced they’d be closed on Monday but open Tuesday through Friday with a two-hour morning delay, so at least the children could get their free breakfast and lunch, but there would be no penalty for missing attendance all week. I could not get off of my block until Wednesday afternoon. Eventually, the tires of neighbors with four wheel drive wore down the snow on the road until it made a track, like the ruts from wagon wheels leading trains of pioneers to the Willamette Valley. I was able to drive my car through the track. I expected to skid and slip. But it was so terribly, impossibly cold that the ice didn’t melt enough to be slippery. Driving on that snow and ice was like driving on gravel.

I managed to get to the church for my after-school lessons. I set out paper and watercolors.

“Paint me the summer,” I told the children.

“Paint me something that takes my mind off this miserable cold and snow. Paint a beach or a cookout or a camping trip or a garden full of ripe tomatoes. Paint me something that makes me feel warm!”

The children painted summer. They painted beaches with bright yellow suns. Some painted the sky coming down properly to the horizon, and some painted the sky as a strip of light blue at the top of the page, with a strip of dark blue water on the bottom. Some painted a grassy yard, with stick figures picnicking and balloons rising to the sky. One little girl took a wide fan brush from the jar of brushes, and dragged it across the colors in her palette. She stippled the brush up and down all over the paper, quickly filling the whole thing with a rainbow of splotches that looked like fireworks or cornflowers. I praised her creativity. She smiled, and took another sheet of paper, and dragged the same brush through three shades of green, and stippled again, making a composition that looked like a nice messy patch of lawn with yellow sorrel. And then she stippled on one more sheet of paper, this one in dark green and blue that looked like the moss at the root of a great big tree.

I put the paintings aside to dry. “Some of you paint very quickly and that’s just fine. Some of you spend the whole lesson on one painting, and that’s also fine. Artists work at many different paces. The only thing that matters is that you make art!”

When I got home, Jimmy’s boy was there in his coat and wool hat. I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, because it had been too freezing cold for a visit outside. He smiled and handed me my Christmas present: a paper gift bag from the dollar store containing a pair of gardening gloves, a grow-your-own strawberry kit, and several packets of vegetable seeds. He’s already excited for our next summer garden.

By the time I got into my house, I felt warm.

I was warm for the rest of the night.