Shared Spaces: Snow as the Inverse of Leaves

If we dealt with snow the way we deal with leaves, people would shovel their lawns and dump the snow in the streets. Winter, then, is the opposite of fall. In fall, people clog the streets with leaves and expect the town to clean it all up. It represents a massive shift of responsibility from private to public. In the winter, it's the homeowner's responsibility to tend to the public space by clearing the sidewalk of snow. We're forbidden to push any snow out into the street, but a municipal plow can come along and push public snow onto our driveways. This often necessitates additional shoveling on our part, but people understand that the annoying reblocking of our driveways is unavoidable if the town is to efficiently clear the streets. Safe, clear streets are valued in winter, devalued in the fall.

The act of tending to the public space reacquaints many of us with some forgotten muscles, and sometimes with seldom seen neighbors. Public responsibilities drag us briefly out of our private caves. I saw the neighbor down the street out shoveling, the fatigue of owning a corner lot showing as she leaned on her shovel to take a break. Notice she shoveled an opening to the street. If the remaining Beatles showed up to replay their Abbey Road album photo, they'd be able to make it from crosswalk to sidewalk and continue on their way.

Not so just up the road, where a sidewalk was cleared but access to the street remained blocked, requiring pedestrians to either climb through 2-foot thick soft snow or double back and walk on the street. The homeowner stopped at the curbcut, apparently thinking any snow on the street was the town's responsibility. A lot of sidewalks must be like that, because the town had a front loader out at 5am, clearing pedestrian access to intersections.

Curiously, the Princeton Shopping Center left its sidewalks uncleared. This seemed as unlikely as my decision to walk to Dunkin' Donuts at 6:30am to buy the "stick" donuts my daughter had made an unusually persistent request for the day before. At least the errand doubled as exercise for the dog. What's the Shopping Center's logic, to be dissing its pedestrian customers four days after the storm?

(Update: the Shopping Center's sidewalks were cleared the day after this post was published.)

My wife, stirred by memories of growing up in snowy Patagonia, took to the shoveling with great verve and passion. Non-traditional shovel designs proved more back-friendly. The shovel on the left, rescued from the curb years back, with an extra handle built in down near the blade, turned out to be very useful, and is something I never would have thought to buy. There's a design with a wheel that I hear is great for manually clearing driveways.

Our house acquired a wavy look, Gaudi-esque, reminiscent of that annoying curve my hair had in front when I was a kid.

The neighbor's roof glacier carried icicles with it, looking a little scary and possibly suggesting poorer insulation in the attic, since a warmer roof would generate more snowmelt trickling down the shingles to the gutters, then turning into icicles. Come to think of it, the giant icicles remembered from childhood were probably an unheeded critique of the attic insulation. They looked great, though, and fed a boy's imagination.

Meanwhile, in the relatively natural setting of the backyard, snow could just be snow, neither annoyance nor burden, a beautiful, blanketing gift.