Right about now, I believe that Ice Melt and Rock Salt is worth more in Connecticut than platinum, gold and silver combined.  Not only that, but it is suddenly more rare than an intellectual at a Tea Party convention.

Now, in this record-breaking winter of our discontent, I’ve been keeping my driveway plowed and the walkways to my barn, garage and woodpile shoveled out.  It has been a pain, and it has been time-consuming, but I have been getting it done.

And just when I thought that I could handle anything that Mother Nature could throw at me, the vindictive little bitch threw a crippling ice storm in my direction last week, turning all my plowed driveway and my shoveled walkways into paths and fields of glare ice, one to two inches thick!

Up to that point, I was a firm believer in not spreading toxic chemicals down on the ground. That was before I slipped in front of my garage yesterday and sprained my wrist.  After that painful experience, I would  spread radioactive plutonium on the driveway if I thought it would melt the ice!

The final straw that broke the camel’s back as far as me going on a hunt for Ice Melt yesterday was when I was outside playing with my two German shepherds.  Fritzy, my 95-pound two-year -old, was chasing after a tennis ball that I threw for him. He went bounding across the frozen tundra that used to be my driveway, and suddenly, he did the most perfect “Bambi-On-Ice” impersonation that I have ever seen.  His legs shot out from under him in four directions, and he went spinning across the frozen expanse like a pinwheel in a typhoon. When he finally crashed into a snow bank on the far side of the driveway andcame to a dizzying halt, he just laid there for a moment, blinking his eyes and softly whining.  Then, he slowly got to his feet and gingerly picked his way across the ice with his tail between his legs, losing all interest in the game of fetch about which he was so enthusiastic just moments before.

Anyway, ice melt, rock salt, sand, and water softeners are nowhere to be seen in Connecticut today. No place has this stuff.  BJ’s Home Depot, True Value, Sears…

Nada.

So, I came back home, came into the house, warmed up by the wood stove, and started to problem solve the situation. (SomethingI am not very good at doing.) However, as I was warming up by the fire, it hit me . . . HOT ASHES!!!!!!!!!

I jumped to my feet, ran down into the basement, got the ash bucket, and began scooping out the ashes from the huge woodstove in the basement.  I then went out and began spreading them on the driveway. The stove in the basement yielded three bucket loads of the stuff. The stove in the tv room gave me two.

And the stuff worked like gangbusters!!!!!!!!

Now, as I look out at my walkways and driveway, I view black and gray ash everywhere.  Some may think it is a particulary ugly scene. To me, it is the most beautiful landscape that I have seen in long, long while!