Shoveling , enough with the shoveling, already…

By the time March rolls around, I’ve had more than my share of shoveling snow. I recall as a young child seeing March represented pictorially in our school readers as kids flying kites on breezy days with big puffy cumulus clouds floating by. I always felt a little cheated as our March in upstate NY was represented by more snow shoveling. This applied to a good portion of April as well. Along the about the middle of April, around NCAA Final Four time, you felt like just stopping with all the shoveling, and figured sooner or later it HAD to be spring and this stuff would melt. We had neighbors named Scheifendecker in Syracuse who adopted this philosophy in December, and even in the formidable face of the 140 inches of snow the area received each winter, discarded their snow shovels and simply aimed their big Ford sedan towards the driveway opening and floored it. Coming home from work, Mr. Scheifendecker would speed up as he approached his driveway, and using the weight of the large vehicle as momentum, would skillfully take aim and barrel up and over the accumulated snow. Well, part of the way up over it, anyways. Their house was directly across the street from ours, and when we heard the sound of someone gunning a big V-8 and tires spinning, we knew Mr. Scheifendecker had arrived home from work and was making an attempt at forcing his land yacht up his drive way. We didn’t have cable TV, and this daily spectacle of snow flying from his spinning rear wheels, his technique of backing up and repeatedly ramming the front end into the season’s accumulation of snow, and eventually ending up with his car perched haphazardly on the hard packed mound covering his driveway became quite a source of entertainment for our family. Mr. Scheifendecker bore a strong resemblance to former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, and to see him emerge from his vehicle in such a calm and collected manner after this display of how to use a Ford Crown Vic as a three-thousand pound toboggan never failed to make me smile. Eventually, along about Final Four time, I grew weary of the constant snow shoveling and found myself using our own Dodge Dart to “Scheifendecker” my way up our driveway. After doing my best to emulate my neighbor’s technique and walking to the front door past my unattended snow shovel, confident that spring would get here and melt this stuff more sooner than later, I felt as calm and collected as Dr. Henry Kissinger. (Posted by Rich Harrington)