Ice, snow, poetry, driving

We got up @ 5 a.m. Tuesday morning and were in the truck [4 wheel drive, ten years newer than car] by 6:45. The sun was shining, the snow was melting. When we got to Syracuse, it started to snow hard. Pretty soon Woody was driving through white-out conditions, I90 unplowed. Finally about an hour and a half later, it turned to rain. We pulled into Buffalo around 4:30. The parking lot of the hotel had barely been plowed so there were mounds of snow and puddles of ice everywhere. Many cars were almost buried. People from Canada come to the Buffalo airport for reasons mysterious to us and leave their cars in this hotel parking lot. Our sponsor was late picking us up so we had weird pizza for supper to get to the reading on time. Very good crowd. Tthe reading went very well and they sold a lot of books – in fact, sold out of my new book MADE IN DETROIT. One of the best poets from my recent juried intensive poetry workshop drove from Rochester to the reading – amazing. If you want to see the cover – I think it’s my handsomest yet – there’s a photo on my website www.margepiercy.com. Buffalo was a mire of slush. At one point our sponsor got stuck and needed Woody to help her free the car. We rose very early the next morning and hit the road for East Lansing, Michigan State. That university has always been good to me over the years and this visit was no exception. We were given a suite in the Kellogg Hotel – very comfortable and exceptionally pleasant. The sponsors took us to supper in the State Room and the food was terrific. The only real food [except for one other breakfast] we had on this trip was in East Lansing at the hotel, great supper and fine breakfast. There was a good crowd at the reading – people standing at the back. Again, lots of people wanting books. There was little snow on the ground and the first bare patches we’d seen. I felt like rolling on the ground. We hated to leave. We left around noon for Ypsilanti. As we approached, we saw a natural phenomenon we had never witnessed and hope never to see again. Ypsilanti [and almost all the way to Toledo, it turned out] had about 5-6 inches of snow but over all of that was 2 inches of ice. It was impermeable and solid, like a mirror over EVERYTHING. Fields looked like frozen lakes. It was blinding in the sun. We had a decent crowd at the reading. We had no directions and unlike our other venues, nobody picked us up so we had to drive across Ypsilanti to the college where we picked at some reception hors d’oeuvres for supper. After the reading, we had no idea how to get back as the street we had crossed town on was one-way and there seemed to be no parallel street we could find. For 45 minutes we drove around until a kind woman in the local equivalent of a 7/11 wrote out instructions for us. We were on the far edge of town from out hotel. Finally well over an hour after we left the university, we finally got to the hotel. It’s a nice hotel, quiet and comfortable, and the breakfast was good.   I’d spoken twice to our friend Dale and we learned the Cape was experiencing a freak snowstorm and at least 7 inches had fallen, maybe more. Everything was closed and Route 6 was shut in places by crashes and spin-outs. Woody decided in the morning to drive all day and as much of the night as was needed to get home. We arrived @ 10:30. Woody had to use 4 wheel drive to get through our road. It took me about twenty minutes to climb the hill through deep snow on my artificial knees. We found the furnace has stopped heating the downstairs. As soon as I walked in, four cats climbed all over me purring. We had no way to get the luggage and briefcase up to the house until woody shoveled out the driveway for two and a half hours. The repairman fixed the furnace today. We’re trying to work out way back to normal from exhaustion, upset stomachs from the unhealthy junk food, my sore knees and back, the mounds of snow everyplace. Still we are incredibly glad to be home. I’m going to cook real food tonight, healthy, tasty. What so many people all food amazes me. When you’re brought up on junk food because there’s no time to cook and little money to spend, junk food is what you think food is and what you expect and desire.