I’ve always loved the cold more than summer and I’m never truly comfortable over 65 degrees. I actually enjoy the relief from thought that shoveling snow can bring. Let’s not get too far into the BS though, I have my limits - like last winter. It was remarkably snowless here in Wisconsin at the start of winter and I dawdled at mounting the snow blower to the front of my garden tractor. I let it slide well into the new year, until one day we got a blizzard that dumped about 24 inches of puffy white water in our area.

I sucked it up and cleared our 150 foot driveway by hand, finishing up exhausted yet still exhilarated very late in the evening. By the next morning I was still exhausted, my back hurt like hell and I was no longer exhilarated when I looked out the window over my coffee and saw that the driveway was uniformly covered with a four foot deep snowdrift. The only exceptions were where it had actually drifted over the top of my SUV and at the road where the snowplow had pushed an additional three feet of salty, crusty ice-mush on top of the snow.

I silently (mostly) cursed my own laziness, finished my coffee and went out to shovel again. I got the Durango dug out, as if I could go anywhere in it, and cleared about the top twenty feet or so. By then I had several realizations: I was no longer anywhere even close to 18; it had been really, really stupid to leave the tractor in the shed behind the house and the auger attachment in the garage; and with tears of frustration freezing to my face, I knew it was going to be a long, so very long dig all the way around the house to the shed where the tractor waited patiently.

It took me most of the quickly darkening afternoon to dig about 75 yards of trail wide enough for the tractor to get through, including two ninety-degree turns. I finally chipped at the ice locking the shed doors in place with wooden arms, a burning iron back and sweat drenched unmentionables. The tractor was sleepy and sluggish in the shed, and I had to abuse it back into life for the slipping, the sliding, the getting stuck a couple times until back in the garage where the 400 pound auger bulked and the tire chains lay waiting.

An hour of laying on cold concrete was all it took to get everything converted from grass mode to the current pressing need. The tractor bellowed its small challenge to the crusting drift, and with the nerve shredding noise of too many mechanical connections I engaged the drive. I pushed the auger into the drift behind the Durango, expecting the rooster tail flight of accelerated snow but was met with the rather more dismally underwhelming back-slopping, back-sassing boil of punished snow out from the front of the auger. I had, of course, wound the drive belt backward in my exhaustion.

I’m gifted with an incredible propensity to muster jaded resolution to any situation. There was no throwing the gloves, no stomping the feet or kicking anything. I turned off the tractor, not even caring anymore if it would start again, laid down in the snow and changed the belt. It was quite easy, actually, because I had also been too lazy to change out the belt at the end of the mowing season, so it was consequently pretty stretched out. I had to max out the adjusting nut, which captured the last pitiful remnants of corded strength and so, of course, it was too tight as I plowed my way up and down the drive.

I was just finishing the last of it when I heard the unmistakable squeal of an over stressed bearing as it began to commit metallic suicide. Luckily, we never really got any snow to speak of after that (at least not while I was home) and equally luckily, the auger hasn’t moved where I dropped it in the garage. Snow’s coming this year. Wanna know how I know? It’s coming because now I have to take the tractor in (with the auger) to get a new pully shaft (bent), a new bearing (previously mentioned), welding on the bearing housing (warped from the heat) and a new chain gear for inside the auger itself (four teeth missing). All in all, I expect a couple hundred dollars of maintenance and if that thing sits in my garage (block heater and trickle charger plugged in) all winter without needing it…

Well… I won’t be responsible for my actions. That’s all I have to say.

Dogs don’t worry about snow drifts. In fact, they’re fun as heck to shove your face into and to tunnel through. Dogs don’t have to dig out the drive so you and the wife can get to work. Dogs can laugh and smile and bark relentlessly at you while you’re shoveling; and like the old joke goes…

because they can.

[I originally wrote this back in the fall of 2007, so I might as well update it now. It’s a seriously good thing I got the auger replaced… yes, I said replaced… because we’re quickly approaching record snowfall here in Wisconsin for the 2007-08 season. I (with the help of Mr. McNett once) have had to shovel my roof a couple of times and bust up ice inches thick before it could all melt through the roof. This has resulted in a fairly large mound of snow directly behind the garage that Parker likes to lay on so he can watch me through the garage window. It’s a little unnerving sometimes, but you get used to it.