Eight Feet of Snow in Ithaca

The man from Ithaca steps on stage and opens with a sweet love song and a smile.  His shirt needs pressing, his jeans are slightly tattered and his hair hasn't seen a comb this day.  Eight feet of snow in Ithaca, he tells us with a grin, but he's made it.  We are very glad to have him.  His songs and stories make us all smile.

The one that stays with me - and I suspect many in the audience - is a ballad about his grandfather, a Navy Seabee who helped build the runways on Tinian Island.  There's a heartbreaking simplicity to the song, an almost painful authenticity.  The lyrics send shivers up and down my spine, they are sad and powerful, grim because they're so true.  The applause is lengthy.  A man who will dig out from eight feet of snow in Ithaca to travel to Louisiana to sing his songs and tell his stories is worth listening to.

In the pre-snow blower days of my growing up in New England, winter often meant waking to the raspy sound of a snow shovel - scrape, heave, scrape, heave - my daddy, so bundled up he could barely move, would be out and at it sometimes as early as 5am.  There were times - rare but memorable - when the drifts were so high he was forced to climb out a window and clear the weight of the snow from the storm door before he could even begin.  My brothers and I were usually charged with making a path from the back door to accommodate the dogs who took a dim view of it all.  We were fortunate to live on a primary roadway - Lake Street was a straight shot from Massachusetts Avenue all the way to Route 2 - we got early attention from the plows and could almost always hear the sand and salt trucks rumbling behind them.  Friends and neighbors on secondary streets and side roads weren't near as lucky, often times it was noon before the snow was cleared, but we all had to deal with the tragic and infuriating habit of the snow plows not lifting their blades as they passed the newly shoveled driveways.

Once the shoveling was done and the plows and trucks had moved on, there was an eerie stillness to those work-less, school-less mornings.  Gray skies or blue, the world was silenced and insulated and stuck.  Like the aftermath of a bomb, I sometimes thought, when I imagined the sound was sucked away and not even a breath of wind dared to stir.