A Midwestern Vision, Snowfalls

Winter, in the Midwest, winter in Chicagoland, winter in a suburb of Chicagoland, each brings a picture. Now think snow. Snowflake falling quickly to the ground, inch upon inch upon inch, and wha-la you have 12 inches in no time, youngsters thinking: no school, a sled day, ice skating, snow boarding, fun shoveling. Oldsters thinking: Shoveling, Snowplowing, Slippery stairs, jumping cars, cars in ditches, salt trucks not out, cars in ditches being towed out, accidents on the roadways, traffic to work taking twice as long to get there, make it through a day of work, and home through it all again to start shoveling and snowplowing. In the city parking spaces to be shoveled out in front of each dwelling, in the suburbs driveways and especially the driveway mouths plowed in by passing snow plows as no parking is allowed on the street during the snow falls, so they get you good after they've pushed all of the streets heavy snows into your driveway compacted twice as heavy to move, so you try to stay up on it and find failure or it could have been worse theories emerging. And we all think back to the children's take on it, and somehow that gets us through.