10

We received 10 inches of snow this past weekend. Not a significantly large amount for a town to receive if you are Buffalo New York or as catastrophic as it would be in Atlanta but a pretty big pile for us here in central Illinois.

We like to think we can handle snow and will stop and ridicule places down south like St Louis or Memphis when they literally shut down when an ice cube is dropped on the ground. We are not really any better. Most of the time we adapt after the first 2 or 3 fender benders. And we are pretty good by the time the last dark grey salt infested ounce of snow is swept away by an early spring rainstorm. It will be pretty ugly around here till then. In an effort to keep people from driving their cars into other people’s living rooms we do the only thing we can. We cover the current snow with about 14 feet of salt. That is our process.

We really aren’t very good at snow removal either. There is no method to our madness. It is basically first come first serve as to where to place your unwanted snow. Every person with a pickup truck is by law required to have a plow on the front and to push snow even though almost none have any idea on how to do it. The first guy out will shove his snow across the street into the front of the poor sap living across from him. Then that guy does the same with his snow and of course the piles just get bigger and bigger. Then everyone’s street becomes a slalom course where you zig zag around the piles on the way to your driveway if you can make it or live at the end of the street. The people at the end are left with just pushing it out into the intersection or just staying home. That is our process.

I remember as a young lad trying to deliver papers on my bike the day after a big snow like this. Some of the streets were clear enough to be able to ride but I spent most of the route dragging the bike and papers thru the snow. I could usually do my route in about 40 minutes but this day I was already about 7 hours in at the halfway mark when I wiped out on Mauvaisterre St. I just left the bike there in the street and walked home and then to school. My mom got like 40 calls from folks not getting their paper’s so she whipped my ass when I got home. That was her process.