polar vortex Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

Rain to Ice

As I sit here trying to decide which of the myriad emotions I’ve felt today I want to express in this post, I hear a whoosh of what I think is the wind. But it’s not the wind. It’s rain.

But the rain isn’t steady. It sounds as if only some of the clouds blowing through are filled with moisture too heavy to contain. Other clouds just pass right by. I can feel a distinct shift in the air, though. Markedly cooler air wafts in through the screen of the open front door.

This is just the beginning of a wild weekend, weather-wise.

It’s May, right? May 8^th, in fact, in this crazy year of 2020.

Perspective via Polar Vortex

We’ve had one of the mildest winters I can remember, so of course there’s a “freeze” warning in effect for tomorrow night into Saturday. And of course, while my area will probably ‘only’ get a coating of ice, northeastern Pennsylvania and points north, including much of New York state, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont are bracing for 6-8” of snow, and even as much as a foot of heavy, wet stuff in some areas.

Hopefully, people won’t lose their electricity to downed wires caused by the storm.

It seems we keep getting reminders on the importance of perspective. If we start paying attention to what’s going on around us, perhaps we’ll stop thinking, “Things can’t get any worse.” Because it’s precisely when we make that cavalier statement that we’re often given a good dose of “Oh yeah?”

What is True

There’s a lot going on out there that’s escaping our perception. We’re being bombarded. We need to keep our wits. We need to remember what’s important. We need to take deep stock of ourselves and who we trust.

Everything we believed we knew for sure is being challenged right now.

We need to stick together. We need to be there for each other. This is when our integrity shines through and calls us to perhaps take leaps into an unknown we never thought we would.

We must stop denying what we see with our very own eyes. This really is as bad as we feel, deep down inside. Does the rain need to turn to ice in May? Do we really need to experience even worse before we wake up and See?

Tigger – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-568)

Dodged a Bullet

We woke up this morning to no water in our house.

Silly as it may seem, we checked the faucets upstairs and down, hoping that one of them might yield a trickle that could, oh, I don’t know – unblock everything else? Yeah…no luck.

I could’ve kicked myself. I’d actually had a conversation with someone just yesterday about the danger, in this weather, of pipes freezing. My friend and I discussed keeping a trickle of water coming out of a faucet, to avoid this very peril, particularly in an old house like we both own. And then, as soon as we had the conversation I forgot it. BOOM. Out of my head entirely.

Whose Fault Was It, Anyway?

So when Karl admitted, chagrined, that he’d not even thought about keeping a little water running through the pipes last night, I had to fess up. It was bad enough that he’d not thought about it at all; but it was far worse that I had thought about it, and then promptly forgot it.

No use in blaming each other. In my experience, blame never improves a situation; it only makes things worse. We’ll be celebrating our 34^thyear of owning this house on March 15^th. In all that time, the pipes have never frozen. There were a couple of years, though, where we had similar frigid snaps. I seem to recall a ‘polar vortex’ hitting us about five or six years ago, if I’m not mistaken. It ended up killing our English walnut in the back yard, the ground froze so deep. Even then, we never had a pipe freeze. Possibly because we kept a little water running through the pipes…

Karl went into the cellar (and yes, we have a cellar, not a basement – dirt floor and everything) to check the pipe that comes into the house from the well. When he came upstairs, he admitted that when he squeezed the pipe, he could feel and hear a ‘crunching’ noise, so he assumed it was ice. Ugh. Lucky for us, though, nothing had broken – yet.

Strategies

We discussed methods of unfreezing the pipe, opting for application of a heating pad. As he was fishing around in our downstairs bathroom cupboard, looking for a heating pad, I was standing in the kitchen, calculating whether there was enough water in my espresso machine’s reservoir to make myself a coffee, when all of a sudden I heard a <<thunk>> and a swoosh.

I called out to Karl, asking if he’d heard it, too. (He hadn’t.) I was really worried that a pipe had just burst and the ‘swoosh’ I’d heard was water cascading onto the dirt floor in the cellar at the front of the house.

Instead, I went to the kitchen sink and tried the faucet once more. Ta da! Water sprang forth, running free and clear. Karl had apparently dislodged enough of the freshly formed ice within the pipe to get it to break free! Huzzah!

Yup. We dodged a bullet. Thank goodness we didn’t have to face either the ordeal of the potential expense of repairing busted pipes, or at the very least, the hassle of no flushing toilets or running water the entire weekend. Lesson learned, we’re keeping the water on at a trickle, and we’re taking the added precaution of wrapping the incoming pipe with a cloth, keeping the heating pad snugly cuddling it securely in place.

I hope all of you are staying warm in the midst of this polar vortex. As a PSA, may I remind you to keep a trickle of water coming out of your faucet until things warm up on Monday.

And may your day be filled with serendipitous breakthroughs such as those we experienced this morning.