ICICLE ROOFTOPS!!!!

Lawns and rooves resembling frosted vanilla-crème cupcakes. Flowers, that just weeks before were hidden with straw, but balmy conditions that caused them to burst back through, are now brown and welted from freezer burn. The Cherry Blossom trees that adorn three places in my yard are the only living tree or plant that has been able to withstand the iceberg we experienced and continued to hold its blooms.

I’ve always heard that birds store food away for cold winters like these, but I haven’t seen any decline in their feeding schedule at my house – even the mockingbirds who never eat out of my feeders are bullying and crowding everyone else out, trying to get to some food.

My husbands’ biceps have increased tremendously, if from nothing else, but toting huge pots of front porch plants back and forth from the porch to the safety of our carport. Every time the temperature is going to dip below freezing, I ask him to please put them back under the carport again. But then the sun comes back out for about a week, and my porch looks empty and sad, and I ask him to move them all back again.

One thing I know for sure, he will never agree to buy huge/heavy pots again, and until we hit a streak of a promised above 35-degree weather again – he will not be moving those pots for me no matter how much I whine, sad-face or pout at him about it.

Our security/border fence on one-side of our yard came down (more like got destroyed) during Hurricane Michael. And while we were blessed that is all that happened to us structurally, it’s been better than three months now, and we were past ready for it to be put back up.

Everyone else, builders that is, were so busy making actual homes livable again for the thousand of people who need their help, so we knew we would have to hire either individual help or do it ourselves.

This past week was the coldest week of our year so far, and as it turned out, it was the week my husband didn’t have any escort work lined-up so I’m sure you can guess what that meant! We headed out to our local Stones to buy all the item’s needed and he started to work on the fence. It was just him and another helper, so it was slower going than usual, and add a rain day thrown up in there as well, so it would be several days before the new fence-line was up and finished.

As worried as I was about him freezing to death, especially since he was just coming off a week-long winter-cold, there were actually days I came home to find he had peeled-off some of the outer layers of clothing, coat and sweat-shirt and was working in long-sleeves with a long john shirt underneath.

But as cold as it was, and as unaccustomed to that weather as us Floridians are, it was not the -76 below and -56 below that other states were experiencing and for that, I was surely thankful!