Sunday, January 5, 2014: Tracks in the snow

This morning I opened my back door to discover that the flight of stairs leading down from my second story apartment to the parking lot below was covered in yet another fresh layer of snow, a good 6 to 8 inches. And still more was falling from the sky, thick and fast. After shoveling off the steps, I took a short walk to the neighborhood Starbucks where I spent 20 minutes or so savoring my venti dark roast while gazing out the floor-to-ceiling picture window at the driving snow. Other than the people coming into the coffee shop, there wasn't much traffic on the street save for massive trucks filled with snow, passing by intermittently en route to some expansive frosty dump somewhere out in the frozen wilderness.

Returning to my apartment, I noticed that the tracks of my footprints from the walk over had been almost completely filled in with new fallen snow. Thinking back over the years, I can't help but to be reminded by this weather of the "Blizzard of '99," in which 22 inches of snow fell on Chicago over 36 hours extending from the evening of New Year's day into the morning of January 3rd, 1999. (While the snowfall on the first two days of this new year, 2014, was only a good 15 to 18 inches, with the additional snow we've had over the past 24 hours we surely must have exceeded the Blizzard of 99's snowfall by now!)

I clearly recall that blizzard, most particularly for the shoveling up after it.

At the time I resided in a nice house which happened to have a long driveway. The distance from the street to the door of my garage, set back deep in the lot behind my house, was around 75 feet. In those days I was working out regularly and didn't mind the exertion from shoveling snow; but with the heavy precipitation from that storm, it took me several hours to shovel from the garage to within 10 feet of the street, where the passing snowplows had pushed up a 6-foot high mound of snow across the end of my driveway.

Tired and hungry, I decided it was time for a break. I jabbed my shovel, upright, into the snow and walked back to the house. I went inside and made myself a hearty lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and navy been soup. Afterwards, I took a long nap.

Several hours later I roused myself, got dressed in my winter gear and trudged back out to the end of the driveway to finish clearing the snow. There I was astonished to discover that some fiend had stolen my shovel. Tracks in the snow clearly showed where the miscreant had stopped his car near the end of my driveway, walked from the car to the point where I had left my shovel, walked back to the car and then driven off into the night.

Lacking a second snow shovel, I ended up having to use a garden shovel to clear the snow, which was a royal pain in the ass. Then, when I went to my local hardware store to replace the stolen shovel, I was extremely disappointed to discover that they were completely sold out of all snow removal equipment, as were all of the other stores in the area at that time.

So here it is fifteen years later, and I still haven't forgiven that bastard!