I’ve been a very bad girl…

 

neglecting you all terribly.  In my defense, it has been a busy week and I have been trying to stay off of my foot as much as possible.  Which means I’m staying in my recliner way too much. 

But since I’m headed back up to Strawberry this weekend to finish the plumbing business Annie and I left behind, I thought I better finish that story before we start living the next chapter.  :)

 

This is how it looked in “The Valley of the Sun” when we left last Saturday morning.  Annie had checked the predicted temperatures for up north and wasn’t too concerned. The weather report I saw said rain and maybe some sleet.  I wasn’t concerned, but then I wasn’t driving either.  Annie has now banned me from all future weather responsibilities. :)

Before long, this is what we were seeing.  I’m giggly like a school girl because I’ve lived in the snow before and miss it.  Annie has lived in Arizona her entire life and never actually been in falling snow let alone driven in it.  She’s a trooper though and the roads (at this point) weren’t bad.

 

This is eventually what my dear friend Annie had to drive through.  We were on the last stretch from Payson to Strawberry and there was no turning back.

 

There was a lot of snow in Strawberry and we sometimes made a wrong turn because everything looked so strange!  Strawberry is not a very big town and to make wrong turns is saying something.

 

We were very surprised to find out that Trixie liked the snow. 

It took Annie a couple of trips to the front of the property and about 15 minutes to find the water turn on.  I was posted in the house to listen for leaks.  I could hear water running in the bathroom and hobbled back there and opened the door to find water flooding the floor. Annie had to run back out and turn off the water.  She made a call to a plumber who said he was too busy to get there that day and we should have called sooner. After the second time of telling Annie that, she “politely” told him she would have called ahead had she known the pipes were broken. She placed a call to her son-in-law to find out if there was a turn off to the shower area.  I had started a fire in the fire place and she was cold and trying to warm up by this time.  I can’t even explain to you the contortionist she had to be to get to this turn off, but let’s just say it involved laying in a puddle of freezing cold water by the toilet…did I mention Annie doesn’t like to be cold?  Understandably, there were no pictures allowed at this point in the process – I value my camera and life too much. :)

 

Annie has gotten the water valve turned off, the towels have sopped up a lot of the water although the room size rug in there is still soaking wet.  We have found a space heater to turn on in the bathroom, and gotten the house furnace turned on also.  Of course, it took us about four hours to discover any heat the furnace was putting out was pretty much all going up the chimney.

There is no way to tell you all that happened.  The cabin never got warmer than 56 degrees, three soda cans had blown up in the refrigerator that were left from the last visitors, the room size rug had to be dragged out of the cabin and there were no nice warm showers to be had the entire weekend.

 

But we did see so much loveliness, we did enjoy our time together, watching corny movies, laughing and talking about the revenge she will heap upon my head well into our eighties, and sharing so much.

 

 

This was the view of the driveway when we first arrived. 

 

The sun came up Sunday morning and the sky was so blue and clear.  The snow started melting and falling in huge plops to the ground.  Annie was nervous that she would have to drive out on terrible roads.

 

  This is what the driveway looked like when we left Sunday afternoon.

 

 

And these flowers had been hidden under the snow along the highway the morning before.  Isn’t it amazing the difference a day makes….and a few degrees?