Peter McKay

Last weekend, like most of the eastern half of the country, we got hit with a snowstorm like we hadn't seen in years. I don't know the official readings, but I measured it somewhere around knee-high in our front yard. The dog took one look at the snow, saw it was over his head, and refused to go out until we'd cleared a path for him to go out and do his business. Trees were down everywhere, and our telephone lines were stretched down to ground level by a fallen branch. The canopy we'd forgotten to take down for the winter was crushed flat under the weight of all that snow.

All in all, we survived pretty well. We lost half a tree, but it was a tree we'd always wanted cut down anyway. And while we lost power, it was for just 12 hours, not even long enough for the beer in the fridge to get warm. I tried hard to empathize with all those who were without power, heat or a phone, but for the first four or five days, all I could think of was how beautiful our yard looked buried in white powder.

On the fifth day, that changed. I was in the kitchen and, as I passed by the back door, I heard something drip. I looked down at the floor to see a puddle of water spreading out across our floor. My first thought, of course, was to yell at the dog, who in his final years has increasingly decided that it's OK to wait quietly by the door. If no one comes by the door within a few minutes, he will just go ahead and pee on the floor. The dog, however, came by at that exact moment, looked at the puddle, sniffed it and then started licking it up.

It clearly wasn't pee. At least I hoped it wasn't pee. I looked at the door, wondering whether melting snow had seeped under the sill. Then I noticed a trail of water running down the door. It was coming from inside our kitchen wall. Then I screamed like a girl.

Despite what my family might say, I rarely scream, at least not like a little girl.

But in this case, I had good reason. In our kitchen, we have a fancy engineered floor of some sort of rare South American wood. "Engineered" means that the entire floor isn't made up entirely of the fancy South American wood — just the top layer. The lower layers are made of particle board and glue in crosshatched layers. This makes sense for both the environment and for my wallet, as I can look like I wiped out an entire rain forest for a fraction of the cost. It also means, however, that if those layers of particle board and glue get wet, they swell up and come apart, turning what used to look like a fine exotic floor into a misshapen sponge. If I didn't find the source of the water, I'd need an entire new kitchen floor by night's end.

I ran upstairs to the spare bedroom above the kitchen. The walls looked dry and the floor was dry, but then I noticed that the windowsills were rapidly filling up with ice in the space between the window and the storm. Water was clearly coming through the walls from the snow-laden, flat third-floor roof above, and the ice dams would have to be cleared off. I screamed again, this time a little higher, more like a cat that's losing a fight.

I have nightmares about the third-floor roof. The only way to get to it is by taking our 12-foot ladder, leaning it up against our pantry out back, climbing to that roof, pulling the ladder up behind me, climbing to the top level of our three-story house, hanging from the gutter and jumping over to the third-floor roof. It's something I hate doing, even in the summer. With almost 2 feet of snow on the roof, it was enough to make a grown man squeal like an injured mouse. (At this point, my pitch was so high only the family dog would hear it.)

A half-hour later, having climbed three stories up the outside of my house with my elbows in ice water, I stopped and stared across the expanse of pure white on my lawn with new snow draping the trees — the whole thing shimmering with a bluish haze in the growing twilight. Suddenly, I remembered something important.

I hate winter.

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