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Reflections – Berks County’s break in winter weather a fractured tale

Mother Nature has given Berks County a break (as of this writing, anyway) from wicked winter weather. Local meteorologists have used microscopes instead of rulers to measure this season’s snow cover.

While much of the nation has suffered abominable snowstorms (My God, even Southern California) and other assorted weather catastrophes, we’ve been spared an avalanche of snow and glacial ice sheets.

Personally, I haven’t been so grateful since I attended my last prison poetry reading. Indeed, a winterless winter has a poetic rhyme to it.

I know climate change is a nasty thing in the big picture. But I’ll take the small snapshot of basking in the unusually warm temperatures we’ve been blessed with.

Some days it’s almost been balmy enough to enjoy a Fijian poolside lunch. If I only ate Fijian food and had a pool.

This could be a stretch, but I believe Mother Nature has given Berks a winter weather break because life has given my wife and me nothing but breaks.

I fractured my left hand on New Year’s Eve. Now before you jump to conclusions and assume I was sauced, my fall happened just after noon when the only thing I had to drink was water and Powerade.

Granted, I wish I could tell you that I broke my third metacarpal in a barroom brawl instead of a pirouetting fall in which I almost took out the Christmas tree in our family room.

Anyway, I wound up having two surgeries to have a K-wire inserted in the broken metacarpal shaft and then removed. For weeks the most I could lift with that hand was one pound.

Since about the only thing in the world that weighs less than a pound is a goldfish, you could say that the broken hand made me feel like a fish out of water.

Then we got another bad break on Jan. 27 when my wife fell down half a flight of stairs and broke her right femur. It is one of the most painful injuries you can suffer and her first night in the hospital was agonizing.

Thank God she fractured the upper portion of her femur, meaning the leg was weight-bearing right after they inserted a rod almost as big as a miniature golf putter in her leg.

Mike Zielinski
Mike Zielinski

Still, life at home became a real challenge with her on a walker and me with one hand. You try doing laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the house and waiting on an invalid with one hand.

If it weren’t for takeout and DoorDash, we would’ve starved to death.

With the pin out of my hand, I now can lift up to five pounds with my left hand. Life is good.

Well, not really.

Sequestered days at home are so boring we both have the look in our eye of a comatose chicken. Some days to kill time I sort Jujubes by color. Waiting for both of us to heal seems almost as eternal as waiting for the next autumnal equinox.

Being compromised is killing our spirit. We’re both used to being whole, not broken.

After all, it doesn’t seem that long ago when I could grab a running back by the bottom lip and plant him like a rhododendron. OK, maybe that was 50-some years ago but time flies when looking in the rearview mirror.

I believe Mother Nature spared all of Berks County from its usual winter wrath as a favor to my wife and me. The old girl took pity on us.

She knew that an old guy with one hand would be a mess trying to shovel six feet of snow so he could drive his wife to her thrice-weekly physical therapy sessions through thrice-weekly blizzards.

I feel really indebted to Mother Nature, except for the time she shelled our home and one car with hail as big as Buicks. But this winter I owe her big time.

Which brings the inevitable bad news. Next winter when my wife and I hopefully aren’t fractured relics of our previous selves, Mother Nature figures to pay us back in Berks County with one back-breaking snowfall after another.

Which is why as soon as we’re healed up, my wife and I are packing up and moving to Hawaii. Our next fall will be off a surfboard and then we’ll only hit water. Or a shark. Or a tsunami.


Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.


Source: Berkshire mont

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