What I Don't Miss About Real Winter

It's' cold here today, and by that I mean it's 27° (Fahrenheit). Not bitterly cold, but cold by Dallas standards. Sometimes I sort of miss the harsh winters of Chicago, where everything had a blanket of white (well, white for a while, then more like a blanket of grey) for weeks on end. When it does snow here, which is rare, it rarely sticks for more than a day or two, and then usually just on earth and grass, never pavement.

What I don't miss, and here we're finally getting to the point of the title, is the shoveling of snow. And it's not really the shoveling per se that I miss, but rather a small event that is a subset of shoveling snow. I don't think this event has a name, but I'll call it the "scrape-thunk-ouch!" event. To whit:

You're a 12 year old boy either shoveling your family's sidewalk out of forced servitude or a neighbor's sidewalk for a buck.

Okay. So far so good. You shove the blade of the shovel down through the snow until it hits the hard sidewalk, then you angle the shovel so it's more parallel with the sidewalk and push forward, thus clearing a snow-free path.

Fine.

Every so often, however, whilst pushing forward, the blade of the shovel will meet resistance from a seam or crack in the sidewalk, and thus suddenly your forward progress is halted with a thunk. Also, since you've been using a fair bit of force to push the shovel forward, this sudden stop is rather jarring and unexpected, and due to the cold temperatures, it sends a wave of pain through your hands. Ouch.

Hence the aforementioned name of this event.

So yeah, I don't miss that.