snow

 Reading Beagles' account of snowfall at the tip of Michigan, my juices were flowing to come back with my own adventures with snow and I have to say there have not been many, and they have mostly been pleasant and that is likely because I have only owned an automobile for two years of my life.

Growing up it seemed like snow was around all winter.  Snowball fights, snowmen, taking the sled a couple blocks down to the railroad yard and sliding down.  And money, there was real money, money made of metal, those huge Franklin half dollars, walking liberty quarters, buffalo nickels, and wheat straw pennies with exotic lead pennies sprinkled through like raisins in a very cheap raisin bran, and all you had to do was shovel a neighbor's walk.

Snow shoveling was the best of chores.  Mowing a lawn, you know you could always be made to do it again because it was uneven or something, but snow, once it was off the sidewalk that was all there was to be said of it.  And you know, it was kind of a neighborhood thing, everybody out there on a winter's evening puffing away, and if there were some old folks on the block you didn't mind extending your excavation across their sidewalks too.

But anymore the sidewalk is twenty floors below me.  The guys do the shoveling, and a pretty good job of it too.  Not like that chintzy little museum of broadcast communications who didn't use to bother and there were about eighty feet of snow hardened to ice sloping down to Kinzie an inviting opportunity to tobogganing  down feet first your head bobbing on each bump in the hardened snow.  Wrote the alderman about that, and maybe many others did too, or maybe the owners had an angel visit them at midnight, but now they keep it pretty clear.

Dawn has 25 likes and 10 comments so far.  I just put up Dusk right now after learning of Beagles' interest.