Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Interrobang asked whether my recent liking snow post was a reaction/response to her two snow entries. It wasn't. But this entry is.

Baltimore got a smidgen over half a foot of snow. Since then, we've had two good melting days and two not-so-good-melting days (maybe there was more melting on the sunny side of Lombard today -- I didn't check). Near the end of the snowfall (so that pedestrians wouldn't pack too much of it into ice) and again once the snow had stopped, I shovelled the sidewalk in front of my house. As, I believe, is required by law (gotta look that up). And despite my fibromyalgia. If the fibro had been very bad that day, I might not have shovelled until much later. If it had been a bit worse than average, I would have only shovelled in front of my own house. But I was doing better than usual -- my muscles still hurt before I even started shovelling, but I figured I could get away with a bit of effort -- so I cleared the sidewalk in front of the vacant house next door as well. After all, who else was going to do it?

A group of children three doors down had one shovel and asked to borrow mine as well once I finised with it. They too cleared (most of) the width of the vacant house next to them, leaving one pile about a meter across between the two vacant houses. The next day they asked for my shovel again, to break up ice and tidy up a bit.

When I finished, there was no sign of any other snow-clearing activity on my side of the street in my block. Later, I saw a clear spot as wide as the front steps leading from one door to the curb; a clean-edged, shovel-wide stripe of snow and ice a couple centimeters deep through the half-foot blanket in front of another house, and a smooshed-to-ice footpath leading to the far end of the block.

Y'know, that ice is pretty slippery and treacherous for us folks who don't suffer from CP, too. I've seen plenty of people walking in the traffic lanes of Lombard street to avoid the dangerous sidewalks. When I went to fetch my car from around the corner, I nearly fell a few times, and I've got pretty darned good balance.

So here it is two serious days of melting (and two days of just watching) later, and how does the block look? About the same as it did when the snow stopped. The snow isn't as deep, but everywhere people let it compress into ice, it's stubbornly ice. A large patch several meters on a side has become ice at the corner. One house waaay down the block has a little bare spot in front of it. The occupied house next to me still has that avenue of ice in front of it. The only houses with bare sidewalk in front of them that doesn't just lead from curb to door are mine, the one where the kids live, and the two vacant houses in between. God help anyone who tries to walk my block on the sidewalk. It almost makes my own efforts pointless -- four house-widths isn't enough to make the block safe to walk on, it's just a tiny reprieve in between the short treacherous section and the long treacherous section.

Not that the city pays any attention this far West, of course.

I don't expect everyone to do the tidy job that I do when my body will let me -- I clear from the curb to the distance of my bottom step, all the way from one side of my house to the other, all the way to bare concrete. (The kids did the same thing, though they weren't as good at getting all the footprint sized patches of ice up. And I managed to do this every time it's snowed since I moved to Baltimore so far.) But if I can't do that next time, I'll at least clear one or two shovel-widths down to bare concrete and make sure that melt doesn't re-freeze across that path, and I don't think that's really too much to ask of any of my healthy neighbours. Now there are an awful lot of vacant houses on my block, so yeah, there'll be patches of un-cleared sidewalk unless somebody feels like doing some extra, but I think we ought to at least have easily walkable sections wherever there are contiguous groups of occupied homes!

And a person with chronic muscle pain and a bunch of children under four feet tall shouldn't be the only ones making a halfway reasonable effort!