We were in Tahoe with friends for a long weekend of skiing, sledding and ringing in the New Year. I woke up around 7:30 and the house was quiet, so I lay there for a while listening to the MR. snore. I let him do that some times because I know he loves it. Usually about 20 snores is all I can take before I politely ask him to roll over. But it was New Year's, so I gave him 25.
Opening the blinds, I was greeted with an even bigger winter wonderland than we'd had the day before. I've never seen so much snow in my life as when we first pulled up to the house. It took the MR. over an hour to shovel a path to the front door! And over night, another foot-and-a-half of fresh white powder had silently fallen.
Downstairs, our godson Jake and his dad were starting to shuffle around, getting ready to go to Jake's ski lesson. Realizing they'd need a ride, I got dressed, put on my boots and bounced downstairs. No foolin', I bounced. It was a new year! A new beginning! This day and 2011 were surely going to ROCK! Because 2010 didn't really turn out the way we'd hoped on the whole becoming-a-family front.
To save some time since Jake and his dad were running a tad late, I decided to go ahead and warm up the car. Broom and keys in hand, I headed outside and made my way up the MR.'s award-winning path, making fresh tracks the entire way. Rounding a big snow drift at the top of my trek, all I could see were the wheels of our car. The entire thing was covered in almost two feet of snow. For whatever reason, I decided to start in the back. The snow was so light and fluffy that I could literally just brush it off with a broom. Piece of cake, I thought.
Working my way around the sides and to the front took about 20 minutes. I was just finishing up clearing off the hood, when suddenly I looked down at my gloves. A flame of panic worked its way up from the pit of my gut to the middle of my throat. After what seemed like 8,000,000 slow-moving minutes, my brain finally found the words. The car keys. THE KEYS! Where were the keys? I'd had them in my hand. And now I all had was a broom handle. Holy shit. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT!
Looking at the ground, all I saw were miles and miles of white snow. Yep, I was in hell and it had frozen over. Frantically, I started searching the pile around my feet, digging through and scooping up snow all around me. Nothing. The panic was now turning into a full-on anxiety attack. No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOO! This couldn't be happening. It was New Year's Day. It was supposed to be a good year. It couldn't be starting like this! But it was. And I wanted to hurl. But instead, I ran full throttle down the path to the house.
Barging through the door, I ransacked the room, thinking that maybe just maybe I'd set the keys down and hadn't really carried them out with the broom. I dumped my purse out, hoping and praying I'd put them in there. But I hadn't. They weren't on the counter. They weren't in the bathroom. They were flat-out NOT in the house. Nope, they were buried in an avalanche of snow and I had no idea where. Happy F-ing New Year.
As my best friend tried to talk me off the cliff I'd settled myself on, I heard the MR. walking around upstairs. I knew what I had to do. Slowly, I faced my fate and made my way up the stairs, my legs feeling heavier and heavier with every step I took.
Once I got to the top, I just stood there until the MR. noticed me. He was a little fuzzy from the New Year's Eve revelry, but he registered pretty quickly that all was not well in the land of Darrah. "What's wrong?," he asked with great concern. "Are you crying?" And with a quivering lip, I answered: "I messed up real bad. I lost the keys in the snow." His eyes widened and then he said the one thing I never remotely anticipated: "My wedding ring was on there. I took it off before I went skiing yesterday." And that's when I really lost it.
My shoulders slouched forward and I succumbed to total defeat. Giving me a big hug, the MR. tried to comfort me, telling me it was all going to be okay. But what else could he do? His wife had turned into a flood of salty tears. In reality, I'm sure he was thinking the same thing I was: We're screwed.
For an hour, we all looked for those damn keys. Even our godson was out there with his little purple shovel. We cleared every inch of snow within three feet of the car, on all sides. And nothing. We found nothing. Staring at the 20-foot mound of snow in front of the car that had been pushed there by the plow, I had a thought. What if I'd flung the keys with my sweeping motion? Lord, help me. What if the keys flung out of my hand and into that Mt. Everest-sized snowbank?
Desperate beyond reason, I started pulling the snow down from the pile in large chunks, pausing between each effort to scan the snow. Ten minutes in, I'd found nothing. But there was nowhere else to look at this point. So I continued to pull and scan, pull and scan. And then. There they were. The *$##$#&*#$# keys.
I wish I could say I learned some kind of lesson in all this, but for the life of me all I can come up with is this: Don't carry a broom and your keys in the same hand when you're clearing off your car after a snowstorm. And don't hang the entire balance of your year on a key ring. Because you just might lose it in a snowbank.
A re-enactment of the MRS. losing her keys...
