Janet’s Hair, Nails, and News

Janet's Spa and Salon

“Why was a man stuck on a barbed wire fence with his pants down in our recent blizzard?” people were asking last night at the local watering hole. “Did his wife not have a wire cutters?” “Why did the school teacher go to town  and back (10 miles)  on foot in the middle of a blizzard?  Well, it turns out none of those things were true even though it was reported in the big city paper “”The Billings Gazette”.  http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_b4508e50-8143-51fd-ac88-dbaf15ea5b87.html

The hub of a small town for the men is usually a coffee shop. Ours is “The Frosty Freeze”.  The hub for women is the salon.  So thank goodness, I had a nail appointment at “Janet’s Hair and Nails”.  I would get the real story from the gals there.

Snow hit our town very badly last Wednesday;  and before a warm Chinook hit on Thursday,  a terrible fierce cold northern wind was drifting people in to their homes.  Jerry Latraverse got caught in a snow drift on his way back up to his house after meeting his daughter.  It was dark and a much harder climb back up the road than he thought.   “He was not caught on a barbed wire fence,” said Melissa, the manicurist, ” He was stuck in a deep drift.”  “When people heard that Miss LoPicolo had hiked to town and back with her son, people said that she must be crazy.  So her students asked her about it and turns out the paper got that wrong too,” Melissa added.   Miss LoPicolo had wisely parked her car on the main road in order not to get trapped.  She then went from her house to her car with her sled.  She and her son then drove to town and back.  Then they loaded the groceries on the sled and made their way up the lane.  That’s when the highway patrol officer spotted them.  They all were able then to put Jerry on the sled and get him into the house until they could clear the drive to get him to the Emergency Room.

Well, that’s what I heard anyway.

Neighbors helping neighbors is what we do around here.  But this is still hard country and with an average of 1.9 people per square mile, your neighbor isn’t all that close sometimes, so this story turned out much better than stories of a hundred years ago when there weren’t cell phones, highway patrols, and powerful tractors.   But I still won’t go out in a storm anymore without some wire cutters and two layers of pants, just in case.