Sensi gave me an assignment during our last session. I am to write about the time I got my car stuck in the snow. The story begins early one morning as I was getting ready to go to work. I was suppose to be at the gym by 5 a.m. for a morning fitness class and had 20 minutes to get there. When I went outside I realized snow had fallen during the night; I saw my car was surrounded by snow about a foot high. The small neighborhood road was covered in snow too. I didn’t think much of the situation. In all my wisdom I thought I could accelarate out of the driveway, speed through the short neighborhood road, and make it to the main road which had already been cleared. After all, I thought, snow is light and fluffy and should be easy enough to drive over. Boy was I wrong (in my defense I’m from Texas. We don’t have to worry about snow). As I began to back out the driveway I got stuck. I mean real stuck. The car was not moving. I tried pushing it with my then 120 pound frame. I tried shoveling a path behind it. That would have taken forever. Suddenly one of my Japanese neighbors preparing to get into his truck to got to work saw me. My Japanese was very limited as was his English, but we didn’t have to speak each other’s language to figure out the sitaution I was in. He smiled a big smile at me and gave me a hand gesture to wait. He went into his truck digging for something. A few seconds later he pulled out a large chain, came over to my car, attached it, and went back to his truck. It took a couple of tries, but he finally manged to get my stuck car unstuck. I thanked him over and over again in my broken Japanese. He smiled, noded his head, and left. It was one of the few times I had interacted with any of my neighbors the whole two years I lived in Japan. The other time was during another huge snow storm; I was heading to a snow hiking event and instead got stuck trying to hike around my home. It had snowed so much during the night I couldn’t even open the front door more than a crack; I had to crawl out of the living room window to go outside. There I spotted all the neighbours with their shovels talking and laughing as they cleared the white powder from their house. While the experince was fun, our efforts did little in preventing the snow from accumulating another two feet just a couple of hours later. I never did make to the gym nor the snow hiking trip.




Neighborhood view right side
Look to the left and you can see all the snow collecting at the back of my car. The hill behind the…




Neighborhood view left side
The right side of the neighborhood. Around the corner is the main street. The snow was a lot higher…




Side view of house
The window on the far right is where I had to crawl out of to clear out my front door. I…




Buried car
This was the view from my front door of my car surrounded by snow.