Free at last

Today was my breaking point. Spending the better part of three days indoors is my limit, evidently. I'd been cooped up since Christmas Eve, which was, not coincidentally, also the last time I'd showered. You know things are bad when you smell yourself approaching from a mile away. But I'd been keeping up with my teeth-brushing. Ten years spanning the broad spectrum of orthodontia prevents one from becoming lax with oral hygiene.

But I digress. My point is, I needed to get out.

Freshly bathed (with clean clothes on too, no less), I squeezed myself past a drift and out the door. The hard part was still to come, as I had to circumnavigate several drifts in the road:

None were as large as the one in the yard. In the above photo, note the behemoth looming in the background. Also, the roof of my car is just barely visible above the smaller, middle drift.

Farther down the road, there was no getting around the smaller, yet still knee-dip, drifts. But, as Meriwether Lewis was apt to say, we proceeded on.

Since the roads in town had been plowed to allow at least one car to pass, the hard part was behind me. Of course, I still had to trudge through the snow again to get back; however, that was in the far, far future. I had made contact with the outside world, which was worth the frozen, stiff pant legs upon my return home.

And the best news of all is a front-end loader rolled through around 6:00 p.m., the skies have cleared, and the wind has died down. Guess who's going running in the morning.

***

The Mission Post Office:

Looking north up Mission's Main Street: