Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday was the commute from hell. A mammoth snowstorm hit our corner of New England, covering everything with about a foot of snow. Everyone knew it was coming but I had not taken the warnings as seriously as I should have. Even the person I was calling in Ghana at 11:00 AM knew it was coming and warned me about it. I asked him whether he had ever experienced a snow storm, “No,” he said, “but it must be very cold.” I generally like snowstorms because I make sure I don’t have to drive. Snowstorms are wonderful when you don’t have to leave your home and sit by the fire.

Yesterday I got up at my usual time, 4:30 AM after my second uninterrupted night of sleep since July 14 (and last night again). I went to work and had a fairly productive morning. At lunchtime Joellen picked me up for a belated birthday lunch. By then the sky had turned grey and it had started to snow, fast and furiously from the beginning, nothing gentle. Axel, who was also in Boston called me on his cellphone telling me to get out of Boston as fast as I could, but it was already too late. I started my commute home at 1:45 PM, naively tinking that I would have plenty of time to get to Manchester for my 4 PM PT appointment. Two hours later I had advanced 4 miles. I called Axel, hoping he was still somewhere in Boston to see if he could find me and drive me home, which I figured, at that pace, would be another 8 hours or so. My whole body ached and I was quite miserable. I pulled over at the Museum of Science, and parked right under the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex. Axel found me there half an hour later but by then the battery was dead. Triple A predicted it would be one to two hours before they would get to us. Axel decided to take things in his own hands and approached the TV van that was filming the traffic mess for jumper cables and then flagged down a car to help us jump start ours. A very nice Russian woman, who impressed me with her knowledge about jumper cables, pulled her car up and we got started again. It took us another 3 hours to advance about 15 miles. By then it was 7:15 PM and we were hardly halfway home. Somewhere along the way our windshield wipers stopped working which made the drive even more exciting. But since the traffic went at about 1 miles an hour we could easily get out and handwipe the windshield every now and then and then get back in. Nobody honked. Nothing had moved.

Anne Dodge told us, via Sita, that we should find to a hotel and give up on our commute, now that we entered its sixth hour. Getting to the hotel that was barely 3 miles away took another half hour which we now considered fast. Of course the hotel was full. Axel had not eaten since the morning so we had dinner. We ate extra slow hoping that by the time we’d be finished the trip home would be quick. We called Jim to get on the internet and give us a traffic update before we put our coats on. It looked as if the coast was clear(er). But when we tried to start the car the battery was dead again. It was 10:15 PM and home was nowhere near. At 10:45 PM our luck turned. The hotel staff successfully jump-started our car again and we zoomed home over empty highways and roads, with battery and wipers working to finally arrive at 11:15 PM. Sita had already gone to bed so I still haven’t seen her. And I went to bed as quick as I could to fall into a bottomless sleep.

The day was not entirely bad. For one it ended well without any scratches on ourselves or the car. But something more important was also worth celebrating: Axel washed his hair with both arms/hands. This was the first time he could raise his left arm above his shoulders. This is the side where his humorus was broken in three pieces and put back together with a metal pin and two enormous deck screws. He could not quite massage his scalp with his left hand fingers, they don’t work yet, and his head still feels woody. Nevertheless, it was one of those things we never thought we’d find worthy of celebration.