I think Mother Nature is cheating on Father Time with Old Man Winter

Know what happens when Father Time decides he’d like to pass another millennium or two by immersing himself in a midlife crisis? So he spends his days popping Viagra and chasing that tooth fairy hussy around, leaving Mother Nature to tend to the same old same old boring hurricanes, tornadoes and floods?

I’ll tell you what happens. Mother Nature decides she’ll have a midlife crisis of her own and pays Old Man Winter a booty call.

And I wind up shoveling a few dozen tons of their illegitimate spawn off my driveway.

Nate is out of town which means I’m grumpy and not just because I miss him but because I have shoveled this stuff no less than 378 times in the past week. My right arm now hangs two feet longer than my left and I swear to God, if I stopped shaving for a day, the entire right half of my body could pass for a short, grumpy, premenopausal King Kong.

We do own a snow blower. It’s big and orange and evil. Nate once tried to teach me how to use it the right way because apparently, I was using it the wrong way. Using it the wrong way is defined as letting it yank me around like a paddle ball so that the driveway, part of the road and a hefty chunk of the lawn wind up looking like a ransom note carved out of the frozen tundra by a bipolar serial killer.

However, doing it the right way wasn’t very much fun either and that’s because having a behemoth of machinery rip my tendons from my bones while my husband stands in the middle of the driveway shouting out instructions like NOW TURN NORTH 90 DEGREES. NOW TURN SOUTH 90 DEGREES. NEGATIVE! THAT’S NINETY-TWO DEGREES! DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME TWENTY! AND THEN GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR NEIGHBOR’S BUSHES is not my idea of fun.

We don’t talk much about that time anymore, except to refer to it as the time when Mommy was sad and the driveway was confused.

It’s only December 8 and I am so over winter already which is really depressing, considering that winter doesn’t even officially start until December 21.

And I know that if it were 90°, I’d be bitching about the heat and humidity and boob sweat but right now I’m making up new swear words to describe the snowplow that just dumped a foot of packed snow at the end of my driveway.

The next time Mother Nature gets horny between December and March, I’d have paid big bucks to ensure that the Heat Miser is bumped up to #1 on her speed dial but thanks to that damn year without a Santa Claus, there’s that whole incest thing so instead, I’d settle for someone pushing Mother Nature head first into menopause and introducing her to a four month long hot flash.

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