This is one of *those* days so I’ll just start typing and see where we end up…

We are having snow squalls again. One minute it is sunny, the next you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Snow accumulations? Jack-doodly. Accidents? Probably many. As hard as it is to drive when there is “significant accumulation”, I think that snow squalls can be more dangerous. You are driving along at high speed on dry pavement and suddenly you can’t see anything and there’s snow on the road and people are sliding all over the place ahead of you… When the roads have *visible* snow on them, [most] people go slow[er]. My commute was fine today. Things didn’t get revved up until after I got to work and actually, when I walked this morning, none of the concrete surfaces I encountered were slippery. I guess we’re back to black ice tomorrow. Yak-Trax or not? We’ll see.

The Commander’s only car accident in her life happened in a snow squall. It was a minor accident that happened a couple years before she died and she didn’t tell me about it right away, probably because she thought I would take her license away. As if I could, because it’s not all that easy to do that. I was concerned about her driving by that time but driving in Sault Ste. Siberia isn’t like driving in Megalopolis and I knew my mother was careful and I wasn’t *there* to help her get places… For the most part, her difficulties at that age were parking lot kinds of things, where she was inching along into a space and something that was sticking out scraped her car. Or her garage scraped her car, even though she was “cagey” about the garage.

Her accident happened on a snow squally-type day. She drove downtown to the library on dry roads under a brilliant sun. Shortly after she left the library, a snow squall blew through and, when she reached one intersection, she couldn’t see the stop sign or remember if there *was* a stop sign. So she inched into the intersection and nosed into another car. She did not get a ticket. The cop recognized that the road conditions were awful…

The Comm had her first accident at something like 88. I had my first at 17. Bad weather was a factor in my accident too. I have a stellar driving record but I think she has a better record than I do. Alas, I did eventually have to keep her from driving. I did that the best way that I could. I let her have a set of keys to her vee-hickle but I kept that vee-hickle in a place that she couldn’t get to. Bad daughter? Sigh…

The problem here is, how does an elderly person get around even a small town without a reliable public transit system. There is Dial-a-ride in Sault Ste. Siberia but The Comm had a really hard time waiting for that bus. I couldn’t manage to convince her that she could afford to call a taxi whenever she wanted to. (She could…) Here on The Planet, buses come by a block or two away from the Landfill. An able-bodied person (like me, who can also drive a car) can easily get to the bus stop. An elderly person with a walker? Trying to navigate icy sidewalks to get to the bus stop? Not so much… I salted the heck out of my sidewalk this afternoon. Many people don’t do that…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.