So, it snowed here yesterday. Thick, heavy snow--very unusual for this area, but always very welcome to schoolchildren and adults who want a good reason to stay at home all day with the latest DVD of 30 Rock. I woke up around 7:30 to the sight of about a half-inch or so on the ground, and my little inner-child started jumping up and down at the thought of snowmen and school closures. I went to make breakfast, watched the snow come down, and wondered idly if I would even be able to drive to church that day.

Then, I got the call. It was my mom. In near-hysterical tones she said, "There's too much snow on the flat-roof greenhouse. We need help knocking it off. We've already been working for awhile, and I'm getting so tired. Come help us."

Now, this is not a new situation to me. All my life, the joy of snow days was always mixed with the guilt at enjoying what was never good weather for the nursery. Many winters my siblings and I have climbed out of bed early in the morning on snow days to cover plants with plastic or scrape snow off greenhouses. So, I pulled on some warm clothes and drove over.

The two-acre, flat-roof greenhouse is a kind of new technology in nurseries. The canvas curtain that serves as the roof is retractable, supported by wires that stretch from wall to wall, and operated by a computer that senses rain, temperature, wind chill... but not snow. When the snow started coming down so heavily, the employee who happened to be out there tried to retract it, but the mechanism jammed. By the time he and my dad got it figured out, so much snow had piled up that the motor could no longer pull the canvas in. By the time I got there, there was already about three inches of snow on top of the ten or so twelve-foot wide strips of curtain, each stretching a little less than the width of a soccer field. The whole structure was starting to sag inward. And it was still snowing.

Inside the greenhouse, my family and a few employees were armed with wooden constructions shaped like large push brooms and were busy trying to knock the snow off the canvas from beneath. My mom handed me one. "Knock off as much snow as you can from the edges of each curtain," she said. "Try to lighten the weight." So I did.

Imagine holding a broom upside down. Make it twice or thrice as thick and heavy. Now imagine thrusting it up above your head, as high as you can reach, for about an hour. Fun, huh? Granted, in that first hour, I was in a pretty good mood. It was snowing, after all. There was a pretty good chance I wouldn't have school the next day. I was glad to help out my parents, and I was having fun joking around with my brother. Little by little, I noticed that the number of snow-punchers had increased. Our neighbors from down the street, whose kids we always used to play with, had showed up. Another set of neighbors from the other direction walked in. A few more employees trickled in. Everybody went to work.

But it was still snowing. More people arrived. Neighbors, some people from church, people I go to school with. We hunted around for tools for everyone: PVC pipe and broomsticks with rags tied on the end, so they wouldn't puncture the canvas. Actual brooms. Pieces of plywood. It started to feel like that barn-raising scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (only without the dancing and singing and weird courtship rituals).

I looked around at all the people (30 or 40 by then) who were willing to come out and help their neighbors out of a crisis. The hours went by. Some people came and pitched in for a few hours and then called others to take their place. Others stayed and worked beside us all day. One girl--an old family friend that I grew up with--got a nasty cut on her nose when her broom handle broke, went to the hospital, got it glued back together (in lieu of stitches), and came back to work for a few more hours.

Somewhere around noon it stopped snowing, but there were still at least five inches of snow on the curtains and the support poles on the outsides of the structure were starting to bend inwards. Every little while there was a loud metallic groan as one of the supports gave way. And still we worked. It was such an exhausting motion that you had to stop and rest every few minutes (especially those of us who are not used to such vigorous manual labor). The hours ticked by and bit by bit we knocked down the snow. Finally, they managed to clear off one of the curtains completely and draw it in manually, and then as more and more workers showed up, we slowly cleared off the rest enough to retract them all almost all the way. Finally, around five, it got dark and we all headed home. We had been at it for over nine hours. A total of around 75 people had shown up to help out.

Today, as you may imagine. I'm a little sore. And by "little," I mean, I'm the most sore I have ever been in my life. More than the first-day-of-basketball-camp sore. More than a-day-of-skiing sore. More than weeding-the-boxwood-field or painting-the-house sore. The muscles of my hands are sore, not to mention the rest of my body--from my calves to my neck. But there's a kind of satisfaction--not only in knowing that the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plants that could have been lost yesterday were saved, but also in seeing first hand the love and sacrifice of friends and neighbors who cheerfully gave up their snow day to do an exhausting and thankless job for my family. That's a value that can't be measured by any standard I know of. 3 comments

Saturday, January 26, 2008