Why I do not go outside

When we got back from Switzerland in early January, we found snow on the ground. That snow cover persisted and amassed, and today we have even more snow on the ground. I like snow. I’ve been living in Syracuse. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if there weren’t any snow around. It’s all I can do to keep sane this winter when I have no car windshield to scrape ice from in the grinding pre-dawn cold. So, thank heavens Berlin is suffering its worst winter in living memory just for me.

But…

Perhaps because Berlin is unfamiliar with serious, snowy winter, no one deals with the snow. Berlin’s solution is to send around a little man with a pick-up truck full of sand. The little man pauses at bus stops and scatters a little shovel full of sand on top of the snow, for traction, I suppose. Or to add grit to your inevitable tumble. So, I wait for the bus perched atop a snow cone with sand sprinkles, just like Dairy Queen. Everywhere that isn’t a bus stop looks like this:

Glare ice atop old snow. Thanks to my tae kwon do training, I move like a ninja. But We have unfortunate proof of the danger. One of our friends here fell while on the innocent mission of picking up a pizza. That was Sunday. Hopefully he’ll get out of the hospital tomorrow. He broke his ankle so badly he needed a plate put in to stablilize it.

And the sun shone today, creating puddles atop ice atop old snow. A few more days of that, and maybe well get down to pavement again. The forecast has highs in the mid-30s. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, at the ends of my arms flung out like a tightrope walker.