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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. How preparing for winter separates the sheep from the goat ropers. By J. G. Fabiano There comes a time in every Mainer's life when he or she has to face the realization that the cool breezes of autumn will soon become the numbing winds of winter. With this realization comes the time when it is necessary to get one's world ready for that dreaded season. This usually happens about the sixth week of the New England Patriot's season. My lawn no longer has to be mowed and most of the outside plants have died. I have also devolved into the ultimate couch-potato thinking that all of my chores have disappeared, along with the warmer temperatures. My wife always puts an end to this notion by reminding me that getting ready for winter is more important than the score of any Patriot's game. The first chore is to remove all the summer furniture from the deck and store it for the winter. This seems like it would be an easy task had it not been for the fact that there is no room in my garage because it is filled with things that I never use. Except I can't forget the one year I actually cleaned out my garage only to need later most of the things I threw out. Of course, I kept all of the things I had no use for, but damned if I was going to lose things of no value only to need them at a future date. This is one of my many theories that make my wife roll her eyes and mutter to herself. Since there was no room in my garage this year I decided to store my outside furniture under my deck. I did this once before even though the furniture came out in the spring looking like it had been stored in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan! I also lost one of my chairs. This is still a mystery to me because I stored all six of them deep in the corner, where the deck joins the house. I stacked them so that they would be protected from the worst of the snow and our wild, winter winds. But, when I pulled them out the following spring one was missing. I know nobody could have gone in there and removed just one without having to remove all six and I think I would have noticed that, or a least heard something in the dead of night. I guess a goblin just reached up from some subterranean tunnel and took it for himself. My neighbor, whose lawn would put any golf course in the country to shame, suggested another chore I should do in preparation for winter. He said I should fertilize my lawn to give it a better shot of survival once spring came. I told him I thought he was full of fertilizer himself - or some close equivalent - but unfortunately my wife was nearby and she slapped me upside of the head and told me it was a good idea. To me there is something downright unnatural about fertilizing a lawn a few days before it is destined to die. But I went out and bought a brand of fertilizer that also had an insecticide in it. I don't know why because I could picture the bugs deep below ground dining on it to keep them fat through the winter. The day I decided to fertilize was also a day of high winds. Late autumn in Maine has a tendency to have many of these days, which would also suggest to me that fertilizing in Fall is not something you would catch any native-born Mainer doing. In fact, I can just picture old guys in plaid shirts cackling to each other: "Know what I saw that darn fool doing the other day - spreadin' fertilizer in October!" Thanks to the high winds I either fertilized or killed most of the lawns on my block and probably knocked a few years off my own life span by breathing in more of it than ended up on my neighbor's lawns! The outside waterspouts also had to be shut down. This doesn't seem like such a difficult task and would probably only take a few seconds except for the fact that I don't have a clue where the shut off valves are. My first winter here I was thrilled by the fact that I found the shut-off for the front water spigot. I proudly shut it down at the first sign of frost and then went to work. When I got there I was told that my wife had called because all the water had been turned off at our home. Forgetting that I had turned off the valve I called the York Water District and asked them indignantly why the hell had they shut my water off. They immediately drove over to my house to discover that I had shut my own water off. My wife didn't talk to me until nearly Christmas and I have been afraid to call the York Water District ever since in case I hear guffaws of laughter in the background. Still, preparations for winter used to be a lot worse. Before I lived in my present house I lived on the Nubble in a small house that had a septic system. For well over a decade I always called the same man to clean it out before the winter snows. One year I called and found out that he had died. It took a while for the receptionist to calm me down but eventually I was able to ask if he had left directions to our septic tank behind because I had no idea where it was. So, after digging up my entire back lawn and killing most of the trees and still not finding the septic tank the new septic tank guy arrived, found it in under 10 seconds and cleaned it. What I remember most about that was how I could hear him laughing above the noise of the engine as he drove away up the street. Another chore I have to do to get ready for the colder months is empty out my dresser drawers and closet of summer clothes and fill them with heavier winter apparel. This part is easy because my entire summer apparel consists of a pair of shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball hat that has to be prized off my head at the end of summer with the aid of a heavy-duty solvent. My winter clothes, though, are a whole different story. My winter clothes take up a couple of hundred cubic feet of space. Mostly heavy sweaters, long-sleeved shirts, massive amounts of underwear and socks and turtle-neck sweaters that make me look like a turtle with no neck! I don't know why I have so many clothes for winter because I usually end up wearing the same pair of jeans and a favorite flannel shirt, and I would wear the same underwear all winter if it weren't for my wife wanting to be in the same room with me every now and then. So, here I sit at the eighth week of the New England Patriots season, my winter chores done, wondering if Drew Bledsoe would consider coming back to New England, and my wife asks me if I turned off the back water-spigot because the weatherman predicted a very cold night. Since I never discovered where the shut-off was I did what I have done for the past seven years in my present home, I told her; 'Honey, we're all set for winter!' The End
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