We picked what we consider to be a great time to have moved here. According to the (awesome) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this is the ninth snowiest January in St. Louis since 1883. We got quite a bit of snow a couple of nights ago:
What's most interesting (and amusing if you choose to see it that way) is just how obvious it is that this is a lot of snow around here. One of Scott's students described (with a tone of awe in her voice) the machine her neighbors used to aid in the removal of snow from their driveway. She couldn't name the object, which her mother later confirmed was a snow blower (they've got one on order from The Home Depot). A woman in the house behind us was using a broom on her sidewalk. But at least they make an effort to clear the white stuff. In our neighborhood, that's not always the case.There appear to be three main methods of dealing with the snow, two of which are captured in the photo below: 1) Not bothering, 2) salting the bejeebers out of it, and 3) clearing a shovel-width stretch of snow that runs the length of the sidewalk.
The first method results in a narrow stretch of sidewalk that gets trampled down by the passage of many feet and eventually can turn to a sheet of ice as the weather warms and cools. The second does no favors to the feet of the many area dogs, including our own. And the third forces pedestrian traffic to single-file columns.
But all three have one blissful thing in common: not once have we heard the drone of a snow blower.
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