Division Essay

I’ve seen a few of them already, tiny little specks floating down from somewhere high above. Examining one up close shows how intricate, and individual Mother Nature can be but, when you get buried in a foot or more of these little specks overnight their unique qualities fade away. They turn into more of an annoyance, robbed of their individual beauty which is replaced by frustration, and a sore back and shoulders. I take those first few natural marvels as a warning, a warning that reads “YOU HAVE A LOT TO DO OUT THERE BEFORE MORE OF US ARRIVE”. Winterization can be broken down into three major categories starting with extra insulation around the house, stopping all the little heat loss areas before they start losing heat. Next is cleaning out the garage, eight months of stuff piled up into one giant booby trap that may all come crashing down after moving the wrong thing first. And finally, giving the car and the jeep a good cleaning before it gets too cold to wash them and the doors freeze shut over night.

I remember as a kid right around this time of year my dad would be walking around in the house with a lit cigarette and a tube of window caulk. He would slowly move from window to window tracing the outside edge with the cigarette, eyes focused on the plumes of smoke that drifted upward. A sudden stop indicated that he saw what he was looking for. He would stare it down for a second then without shifting his eyes the lit smoke would go to his mouth and the caulking gun to the window. “Gotcha”, he’d say as he smoothed out the bead with his finger tip and systematically moved on to the next air leak. Nowadays I use the same method but instead of a lit cigarette I use an incent stick, but that is the only difference. Window caulk, weather stripping, and foam-in-a-can insulation are the main weapons of choice in my winterization arsenal. Every fall the three exterior doors in the house get a new strip of half inch weather strip, that stuff is great. I have to double it up on my front door because it doesn’t fit squarely in the frame but once that is done there is no draft around that door. It’s also cheap and very easy to use, if you can use tape then you can use weather stripping. Foam in a can may be the single greatest invention for winterizing, it may be messy to use but it works awesome. I put a solid bead of it around the sill of the house last year and it actually kept my un-heated basement warm. Well, not warm but tolerable hovering around fifty degrees. This year will be a test for it, in the past years the hot water pipes from my forced hot water baseboard threw off enough heat to keep it above freezing. Now I’ll be heating the house with a pellet stove and hopefully the heat upstairs will radiate down, all the more reason to keep as much heat inside as possible.

In the winter I keep my car in the garage only driving it on the days when the roads are clear and none of those pesky white specks are in the forecast. Once the snow is gone in the spring and the car is being driven daily my garage transforms from a car bay into a shrine to the junk gods. The summer yard toys get pulled out their winter storage spots one after another and after they have been played with never make it back to where they were. Instead they end up slowly being piled on top of one another until finally in the fall they stand like some un-conquerable mountain of bikes, golf clubs, and pool toys. When the day comes and it’s time to conquer the mountain it takes just that, a day. This year I had an added twist, four tons of wood pellets sitting right where my car goes. At forty pounds per bag it took nearly half a day to move them into the basement but once they were moved it made the garage cleaning look a lot less intimidating. With just a few more finishing touches and a good sweeping it will be transformed back into a garage fit to house a vehicle.

The third and final task at hand is to clean the car and the jeep out. A few years ago when the car was new, I washed it at least once a week. Now I look at it and there are still bug guts splattered across the front end, almost like some memorial to all the insects that perished on those late night rides home from work. No worries though, the pressure washer will strip them off with little effort. I look at the jeep and it still looks clean. During the summer months the only time it moves is when it is loaded with trash and headed for the town dump. But none the less, both vehicles need to be cleaned soon to avoid doing it in the freezing cold like I’ve done in past years. I start with the interior, vigorously sucking up dirt and debris with my shop vac. Once that’s done I’ll wash down the dash board and other surfaces with warm soapy water then wash the windows. All the interiors will need after that is a new air freshener. The exteriors then get a thin coating of Simple Green, they sit for an hour or so, and then get blasted with the pressure washer. This strips all the grit and grime off for good. I go over the surfaces with a sponge and get all the stuck on nasty stuff that the pressure washer can’t get. After they dry I put a good thick coat of wax on and buff them until they shine like the sun. The wax really helps protect the paint from salt and the liquid brine that is sprayed on the road before a big storm. As we all know, living in Maine and driving in our winters can ruin a good car in just a few years.

Once all these tasks are completed I can confidently look toward the sky and say, “Come on winter, bring it on, I’m ready”. As little as I like the sound of that it’s true, I am now ready to get buried in little white specks and shovel my way out of them. After all winter isn’t all bad, I love playing in the snow with my oldest boy, maybe someday I’ll spring for a snowmobile and have some high speed fun. Plus I get to go back to work on the ‘new’ wishing well I’ve been building in the basement for the last two winters. Depending on how much snow we get this time around, I might actually have it finished by the time all the snow is melted.