Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Melt Down

“Hey Hey what’s that sound? All the mammoths are in the ground.” I assume that almost everyone has seen IceAge. And if you have seen the first, you have seen the second, and the third. They just keep coming. But my favorite is IceAge: the Meltdown. And I practically lived it this past weekend. I was in Madison Georgia (near Athens) where my horse is in training for practically the entire weekend and, like all Georgians, was astounded by the snowfall on Friday night. The day was lovely until around three o’clock and then the snow began. And it did not stop until very late that night. The rolling hills were heavily covered in a blanket of snow and the trees bent from the weight of their powdery burdens. Long story short, I have not seen much in this world that is more beautiful than a horse farm under snow. It has a classic, greeting card type of feel. On Saturday the snow was still there, but it had already started to melt. By Saturday evening it was entirely gone. Small patches remain along the fence line and on the roofs, but that was it. And along with the melt down came the water. The picturesque farm went from white and fluffy to muddy with patches of standing water. The pastures went from beautiful sites to fences and puddles. The scenery had changed dramatically in the course of a few hours. Needless to say, the snow was more desirable. Rivulets of water made their way down the hills, into stalls, through muck piles, off of roofs, onto roads. And froze. Sunday morning, the stairs were coated with ice (which I discovered by sledding down them, on accident), the mud from the day before had frozen, and the ground was as hard a rock. This is the common pattern of snow in Georgia. Snow. Melt. Ice. And the snow rarely lasts more than a day and a half. Northerners and Southerners laugh at us. We are too far south to know what a true snow day should be and still too far north to enjoy sixty degree temperatures in the dead of winter. And then we discuss the temperatures. Multiple times this winter it has dropped well below zero and water troughs have frozen thick enough to hold the weight of two teenagers….jumping up and down on them. When broken the ice was measured near three inches thick. Does this sound like Georgia? Not particularly. If asked how the winter in Georgia was I plan to say something along the lines of “Really warm, compared to Michigan.” It is true, we do not have winters as bad as our northern brothers and sisters but they signed up for that when they moved there, and cold simply is not mentioned in the Georgia welcome packet. Great. Now that I have nothing more to say I still have quite a few words to use before I reach five hundred. And now I’m there. Five hundred. The end.

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