Yes. It snowed this week.

Let me tell you the truth.

I have been crying.

I am sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday morning, and I am looking out my front window at about five feet of snow that is stacked against it, snow that has fallen off the roof. There are birds and squirrels hopping around outside. I threw some seed out for them. Watching them always brings me joy—so why the tears?

The main problem, I guess, is that we had a week when about three feet of snow fell on my little town, and the electricity has gone on and off, on and off. It is on now, and for that I am grateful, but also—my street has not been plowed. All the roads around me are clear. I can see people up the street driving in and out of town, slowly and carefully, without any problem. After the storm, after the three feet of snow, the world is open to them again! Not for me. In the decade I have lived here, the county has always plowed my street—but not so far this year.

There are reasons, I know. There was a plow driver who went into a ditch with a snowplow up the street during the first night of the storm. My neighbor watched and said it was quite a production, getting him out and back onto the main road again. Maybe that made everyone in the county office a little more cautious than usual?

Also, there was a car that skidded down the hill above my house early in the storm cycle. It finally came to rest across the street from me, basically in the middle of one of our main streets. My neighbor and I had dutifully moved our cars up the street and parked on the side of our road, like we always did when we knew a storm was coming. Except with the stranded car and my neighbor’s truck parked a little too close to the end of the road, the plow drivers weren’t sure they’d be able to get down our street and back up safely.

I didn’t realize this at first, though. It took me several days of calling the Public Works Department to actually understand why my road wasn’t getting plowed. The county has a new helpful feature on its website where you can track snowplows and see which nearby streets have been plowed. I learned about this Tuesday, the first day of our storms. I checked the “Where’s My Plow?” site and saw that all the streets near me had been plowed, except for mine and the one above me. The woman who answered the phone at the county office was helpful. She looked at the website, agreed with me that my street hadn’t been plowed, and promised to relay the message to workers in the field and call me back.

She left a message, assuring me my street would be plowed soon.

I checked the website later and noted that the street next to mine had been taken care of, but mine still had not. Strange, no?

I called again the next day. She said she would look into it again and call me back.

That was a long day without any plow.

The next morning at exactly 8:00 a.m. when the office opened, my phone rang. The woman from the county office explained what the problem was. She kindly reminded me that there was a law that it is illegal to park on the street during snow season and that was why the plow was unable to get to us. She said that I should talk to my neighbors who had their cars in the wrong spots and that I should move mine, too. She said they would be happy to plow the street as soon as the cars were moved. Continue Reading…