Why today is the most important shovelling day of the year
Wherever you draw the line in the snow, it stays until spring, writes Joe Boughner.
It’s your old pal Joe the Suburban Dad here with the first “Driveway Shovelling Tips from a Suburban Dad” offering of the season.
So tie on your scarves, lace up your boots and dig out your YakTrax. We’ve got work to do. Now sure, friends, we’ve had a few false alarms already. The more keen of us have even been out for a few practice runs with our trusty shovels.
But aside from the few, the proud and the obsessive, nature’s thrown nothing at us that a bit of patience and an unseasonably high temperature upswing couldn’t handle.
But this? This one’s different. This is the official start of driveway shovelling season.
Look at the 10-day forecast, kids. This one’s sticking around. Which means today is the most important shovelling day of the season. That’s right, today is Bank Establishment Day.
“But Joe,” I hear you say, “we got less snow than was forecast. It’s barely a dusting!”
This is true, rhetorical person I just invented for the purposes of constructing story-advancing dialogue. And that’s what makes it so dangerous.
Because no matter how lightly the snow falls, friends, Bank Establishment Day is Bank Establishment Day.
Whatever lines you draw in the proverbial sand (or literal snow) today are your lines until the spring thaw.
And sure, it can be tempting to shovel out just a car-width as you rush out the door. I understand the appeal of a quick shovel’s width of walking path to the front door; to get yourself out the door and make sure the delivery folk can still get to you with your parcels; to fulfil your minimum legal obligation to provide safe passage to your abode and deal with the rest when the real snow falls.
After all, ’tis merely a dusting, right? Wrong. Today you are establishing your beachhead for a months-long battle with winter’s worst. Your front line in a war with the very elements themselves.
The repercussions of a lacklustre effort at this critical juncture? Potentially dire.
For you see, dear reader, at the end of the day your banks will freeze.
Your residual snow will compact and harden.
Those tire tracks on the driveway, so small now, will be rock-hard mounds that only the most vigorous effort will remedy as winter wears on. Your laziness will haunt you right through Christmas, past the feast of St. Valentine and into the ides of March.
This, reader, could be you — if you fail to establish a beachhead: “Sorry friends, we’d love to host a festive gathering, replete with merriment and splendour, but — you see — Chad was in a rush to get to the store a couple of weeks ago and now our driveway is an impenetrable fortress of frozen regret. Our walkway is non-existent. We’ve been housebound and living on pantry rations for weeks. Hope to be free by Easter, maybe you can swing by then?”
Don’t let it happen to you. Get your shovels and get out there, friends. Shovel to the very edges of your pavement and build your first, tiny banks. Dig in and fortify, for your driveway will only get narrower from here. You’ll thank me later. This has been “Driveway Shovelling Tips from a Suburban Dad.”