Now that I’m an adult (sort of), I find that I don’t quite enjoy snow as much as I used to. It does bother me that I don’t, but I guess I’ll get over it, because that’s what adults do (I hear). But I’m not over it yet. I know that because, the day I wrote this article, I woke up to two feet of snow.
When you’re a child, there’s absolutely nothing bad about snow. Snow is magical frozen pixie dust that falls from the heavens. You don’t have school and you can spend all day playing in it. You can make snowballs and snowmen and snow forts and sno-cones.
But when you’re an adult, snow is just a hassle. Snow is when the atmosphere solidifies and falls on your head. It goes down your shoes and up your pant legs at the same time.
So it’s very nice that your kids don’t have school, but you still have to venture out in these conditions to go to work. You’re going to be stuck in front of people who are driving too fast and behind snowplows who are shooting rocks and salt out their back ends onto your car. You’re going to be stuck behind people who think it’s funny to leave two feet of snow on top of their car and then to drive really fast so that it hits you in the face, so you have to slam on your brakes and all the snow from your roof cascades down onto your windshield, because it turns out that you didn’t scrape the top of your car either.
This is because, for some reason, you can never manage to find enough time to dig your car out of the snow, let alone shovel your driveway, steps, and sidewalk. For one thing, as an adult, the moment you step outside, you sink all the way into the snow. You say, “I can step over there; it doesn’t look too deep,” and then WOOOOOOP! You step right in until your waist. And then, with your other leg still resting horizontally on top of the snow, you realize that the entire lower half of what you stepped in was actually a really cold puddle. Meanwhile, your kids are walking around on the surface of the snow, not sinking in at all, and they’re laughing.
“Ha ha! Totty fell in! He’s so funny!”
Maybe I should wear boots. But I don’t even own a pair of boots. I never actually went out and bought them, because how often does it snow, really? And then when it does snow, I’m not going to shovel out my car and risk my life to drive out and get them. I do have a pair of rubber galoshes that go over my shoes, but I keep those so far under the bed that I’d have to shovel to get them out. And I wouldn’t want to put them on anyway, because it takes an hour and a half to force the shoes in there, and after all that they don’t really go much higher than the shoes.
But boots or not, if you’re an adult, you have to spend time shoveling. Shoveling is grueling work, and it’s pretty boring, so you get lost in your thoughts and start doing math in your head. For example, you can figure out that if your shovel is 17 inches by 14 inches, and the snow is two feet deep, then you’re essentially, with each scoop, lifting about eight gallons of water at the end of a stick. And then you’re heaving it as far as you can over your shoulder, over and over. Lift . . . HEAVE! Lift . . . HEAVE! You also spend the time asking yourself all kinds of questions: “Why on earth do we have such a long driveway?”; or, “A corner house? What were we thinking?”
But that’s not even my least favorite part of shoveling. My least favorite part of shoveling is when I put all my weight into the shovel—because I want to lift my eight gallons—and I hit a crack in the sidewalk.
No, scratch that. The worst part of shoveling is when you have to dig out your car that is parked on the street. Thanks to the snowplow shoveling exactly one lane down the middle of your street, the snow around your car is about three times as high as everywhere else. You have to get your shovel as close to the car as possible without scratching it, because if there’s even one molecule of snow under the car, the car will refuse to budge. The tires will spin, you’ll smell burning rubber, and then all of a sudden you’ll lurch forward out into the one-lane strip at 500 miles per hour. So you’re going around the car, putting your full weight into stubbing your shovel on the edge of the curb, losing your footing several times because you keep misjudging where the curb ends, and at several points accidentally wedging the tip of your shovel under the tire and attempting to lift the entire car. And then you finally finish cleaning off the car to find that—what do you know—it’s not even your car.
Okay, you’re smarter than that. I’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened to you more than once or twice in your entire life. But what you do find when you finally dig your car out is that, by the time you come back from wherever it is you needed to risk your life to go—what do you know—there’s another car in your spot. Someone was just driving around, and he said, “Hey, look! A spot with no snow! And it’s exactly the size of a car!” So when it snows, my plan is to keep my car where it is until the spring thaw.
But there are ways to reserve a spot. Some people leave out chairs or garbage cans, for example. I recently read an article about a neighborhood in South Boston that is very densely populated, and the people there actually have full-out wars over parking spaces. They leave all kinds of stuff in the spots—old furniture, boxes, clothes stuffed in the shape of a person—and if someone takes their spot, they do all kinds of things to the car, such as shovel it back in worse than before. I’m not condoning this, but I do sort of understand. Imagine you have a plot of land and you spend days digging a hole for your foundation, and then as soon as you turn your back, someone sneaks up behind you and puts a house there.
“Oh, I’m sorry. There was no chair.”
It’s gotten to the point where people are reserving their spaces for generations, because one day, many years ago, their grandfather dug his car out of that very spot. So now there’s a law there that if anyone leaves their stuff in the space for more than 48 hours, the cops will drive up and haul it away. So in other words, if you live in that area (or any other area that has the 48-hour rule), and you have some garbage that the sanitation workers are refusing to take, such as an old stove, you should just shovel out your car and leave the stove in your spot, and the cops will haul it away for free. Not that I’m condoning it.
We’re out of space here, but I’m not done. Tune in next time for part two of this article. Especially if you’re snowed in.

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of three books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com.