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Snow dogs. Are they searching for conch shells?

Conch shell in the driveway

I was dreaming that I was at the beach. In the Tobo. That was the name of the house my family rented at Litchfield Beach below Myrtle Beach when I was a kid.
It was a cool place. Oceanfront. I can’t remember how many people went. My dad’s brother and sister and their families. Some other people. My grandmom went once.
One of my favorite memories from there had to do with Dad’s sister, Aunt Ann. She combed the beaches looking for seashells like she was being paid to collect them. Her main desire was to find a conch shell and she was simply having no luck.
One afternoon, I was walking down the driveway to the Tobo and I saw a pretty rock. I bent down and scraped the dirt off and it kept getting bigger and bigger. It was a pink conch shell. Nearly perfect. Right there in the driveway.
The phone rang.
I swam out of the beach dream and grabbed the phone, still not clear about why I was not at the beach.
“Is Kenny there?”
I squinted at the clock. 4:02 a.m. I wanted to say, “If he’s not here, I’d like to know where he is.”
I handed the phone over to him.
Because there had been predictions of foul weather before we went to bed, I wasn’t surprised that the phone rang in the wee hours. One of the Umps many jobs is that when it snows he goes to work for the Virginia Department of Transportation driving one of those big trucks you see on the highways and byways after a storm.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He struggled into his clothes, trying to wake up. I struggled to make coffee with one eye open. I made him a sandwich to go with the coffee and he was gone.
Snow was pouring from the sky. Flakes seemed to be sliding down invisible slides of ice, they jetted by so quickly.
I thought about staying up, doing some work on the computer.
Instead, I turned off the lights and headed back to bed in the dark. I snuggled back into the still warm sheets and called for Peanut who was curled up at the foot of the bed. “Come here, little dog,” I said softly. He got up, stretched like a cat, and waded through the comforter, eventually coming to rest on the Ump’s pillow.
“Good dog,” I said and drifted back to sleep.
My dreams did not lead me back to the beach. I twisted and turned a bit, eventually turning on the television and setting the timer. Sometimes that works. Keeps my mind from being fully alert. It worked.
Until 7 a.m. when Olivia called. She came home over the weekend and was staying down at her Mimi’s house.
“I know ya’ll aren’t up yet, but did you know it’s snowing?”
I told her that indeed I did know it was snowing and that her dad had already mounted his orange steed and headed to I-81.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
When we parted company on Saturday, we decided Olivia would take my car back to Radford because hers needed some work done. We knew that we might get some freezing rain. We really weren’t prepared for eight inches of heavy, wet snow.
I told her that her dad would find out what the roads were like and we would make the decision around midday.
I hung up and got up. No going back to sleep this time.
I ended up spending the entire day alone. Olivia did eventually leave about 3 p.m., but I only saw her for a few minutes before she took off.
It was kinda like finding that shell in the driveway. I had so many things to get accomplished on Sunday. Web site updates and newsletters to compose and write. I needed some quality time at the keyboard. A normal Sunday, however, would have been filled with other things to do and I wouldn’t have gotten these things accomplished.
At first I was fussing because I was stranded at the house.
Then I realized that I actually found a conch shell in the driveway.