Snowbound Shelby
Snowbound Shelby
It was in February 2003. I was in my senior year of college. I had come home for Valentine’s Day weekend. One of the neighbors had invited my fiancé and I over for pizza and a movie. The pizza was all right, but the movie was based on a book I had to read in high school and absolutely hated. Another one of the neighbor’s friends had also come over and brought his son and some music. He said he knew everything about Oldies so he and I sat there and quizzed each other.
Finally after a while our neighbor offered my fiancé a Rome-n-Coke. He accepted even though he liked White Russians better. Our neighbor’s daughter, Lynn, who was nineteen at the time, loved wine coolers. We had a few in our refrigerator at home. With her mother’s permission, my fiancé went and got her a couple and brought me back one as well. Wine coolers are basically the only alcohol I drink. Lynn and my fiancé decided to have a drinking contest. She swore she could out drink him. When she was on her seventh, he was on his eleventh, but he was also eating. She wasn’t. By the end of the night, Lynn was drunker than a skunk and my fiancé was pretty much stone cold sober. I had two and a half wine coolers of my own and the last half of Lynn’s. When I tried to say my ABC’s, I got all the way to S. I can’t walk a straight line when I am sober so that was out of the question. I changed into a t-shirt because I was getting hot and put it on backwards. I swore up and down I wasn’t drunk. Luckily, we lived right across the street so I didn’t have too far to walk. And then my fiancé went out at 2:00am in shorts and shoveled snow.
By the next morning, we had nineteen inches of snow. After plowing and creating big high snow piles my fiancé took pictures or our neighbor’s younger daughter and me standing on top of these piles. Then we walked around to show how deep the snow was. It came up past our knees. This was on a Sunday and I was supposed to take the Greyhound bus back up to college early the next morning. They had issued a level 3-snow emergency so it was very unlikely the bus would be running. I was officially snowbound.
I called and e-mailed all my teachers to let them know not to expect me for class. The next day, my fiancé and I just played in the snow. He threw me a huge chunk of snow and knocked me over. We also went tubing up on his aunt’s property. We both slid down the hill by ourselves. Then we decided to try and go down together. Half way down the inner tube tipped. He ended up on the ground, I ended up on top of him and the inner tube was on top of me. After a couple more tries, we finally made it all the way down the hill.
By Thursday, I still hadn’t been able to make it back to college. Since I had already missed four days of classes, one more day would not make much of a difference. The weight of the snow had caused the water line to break. With 19 inches of snow on the ground, my fiancé and I decided to make use of it. We went out and got buckets of snow and boiled it on the stove. I felt just like Laura Ingalls Wilder.
When I finally did make it back to college, all my teachers understood and didn’t have a problem with me not being there. All but one. My ice-skating teacher said since I had already missed some classes, I had to make one of them up.
