SNOWED IN

justin & crystal

I went out for a walk in approximately 14" of snow. If the snow had fallen all night as forecast, we'd have had at least 2 feet. I looked outside at 8:30

last night and the snow had ended. A light mist of freezing rain was in the air. No more snow after that. It made a beautiful day. I was thinking this morning of a hippie band from early 70s called It's A Beautiful Day. They were actually pretty good. With a name like that, I didn't even want to hear them the first time, but they were good. I even bought something by them in the Age of Vinyl.

No radio show today. Sue never made it to the station. It never went on air. There was an attempt at mail delivery today. A red pickup came about 5 hours late and skipped my mailbox. It was too great a distance to the mailbox from where the road was scraped. Shux. A movie from netflix was in the mail today. Now I'll wait til whenever. If he couldn't reach the mailbox, he won't reach it Monday or any day next week. I'm not shoveling the snow from in front of the mailbox. Even if she could get out from home, then the driveway at the station I know has not been scraped. The station manager would never think to have something like that done. I couldn't have got out even if Sue had been able to make it to the station.

Every minute of the day I wanted to be out in the snow. Finally, about 3 I decided it was time to get out there. I liked the late in the day sun for shadows on the snow in pictures. I'd just stepped out into the road and getting a picture of the Catfish and mailbox with big piles of snow on them. Here comes a white pickup. I step out of the road into snow to my knees where the road scraper threw it. It was the sheriff. Must have been out 4-wheelin. Next, I'm walking along the road and here comes a 4-wheeler, and another over the top of the hill. I step out of the road and suddenly I'm face to face with Justin Smith and his wife Crystal I'd recently become acquainted with. Her dad worked on the Catfish to get it going perfectly.

I told Justin the sheriff just went by. The sheriff passed them earlier. Justin was surprised, because it's not legal to run the 4-wheeler on the road. But there's the same as no traffic today. We figured the sheriff wasn't going to get excited about it on a day like this, when he's the only thing on the road. The last sheriff was a thug and his deputies were a gang of thugs, one of them in prison for a long time, the one most passionate about putting young guy behind bars. He was a bully. I'll bet he's not a bully in prison, unless he can find the nerd all the bullies pick on. The sheriff we have now understands the law and he understands how it works. My feeling is that he's a fair minded sheriff. One of those things that comes under you'd think is a sheriff would be fair minded. That aint necessarily so. The sheriff before set kids up to send them to prison for however many years. The sheriff now sets kids up too, but more a warning than shipping them off to hell on earth for the sadistic thrill of it.

It was a happy occasion to see Justin and Crystal again. Justin's dad came between us in the most objectionable kind of way, sending messages to me by Justin and quizzing Justin for info on me. Making him into a spy that was very difficult for Justin to handle. That's when I had to step out of the game and let them do what they had to do and me not in it. I knew it wouldn't last long, in years. Back in May Justin and Crystal married. I was invited to the wedding, but looked at the tension my presence would create and chose to stay tension free. I learned later Justin's dad never went, and probably afraid he'd see me. We had a hard time over what he did to Justin and his own mother. Much tension.

I've met Crystal a couple times now. Her parents I think of as my friends. By friends, I mean people I believe I could call on in desperate need and they'd help. They're God loving people. They love Justin and respect him. He's the same toward them. He's in a good family where everybody cares about everybody else. The day I picked up the car from Chuck, Crystal's dad, she came into the office. It was the first time we talked. There was something about how she looked, her face, her countenance, that rang some bell I couldn't find. After getting the picture above of them, I looked at it full screen on the monitor and saw what it was. Their faces are almost exactly the same. It's like she is the female face of him and he is the male face of her. The more I looked at it with a curious eye, the more they looked alike.

Crystal is a worker. She's the kind of woman that impressed Jr. His wife Lois worked with Jr side-by-side all along their time together. Crystal started a photography studio for weddings and so on, and is busy as she can keep up with. Justin is a good worker too. And he can do anything. He has a good mind, just hasn't had a great deal of encouragement to focus it. He's doing well at his Napco job. She might be able to help him get some focus. He may already have it, for all I know. It's been a few years since I've seen Justin. I'm happy to see he's found a good home. He'd been waiting all his life for one.

The "perfect storm" turned out to be a gentle storm. There has been no wind to make the snow drift. A day of sunlight on it melting some of the surface molecules made just enough paper-thin ice on top to keep it in place. I don't know how it was other places. It's a beautiful snow, and so benevolent not sticking to wires and breaking tree limbs, white pines going off like shotguns when their limbs break. We were spared the worst it could have been, which is how it was prophesied. The worst didn't happen and we ended up with a beautiful snow on the ground and a good excuse to spend Saturday indoors, a full day off from everything.