Snowplow

As I sat in the darkness before our lit Christmas tree this morning, drinking my “coffee drink” of “some coffee added to milk,” wife still in bed, I heard a familiar sound that always gets me in a good way: the sound of a snowplow scraping down the road.

When I was a kid growing up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, when we used to get tons of snow between October and, well, June…I used to be awakened in the early morning hours by the sound of the snowplow running down on Route 30, directly in front of our house. My bed was directly under my window, so I’d pop up and look outside for the flashing lights of the plow. Many times, for some reason I never figured out, it would stop at the edge of our property, between our home and the Ohmann’s, and just sit there. And I’d just hang out, soaking in all the cool atmosphere of the dark, the snow, the snowplow and its lights. I loved that perhaps only me and that snowplow driver were the only ones up at this hour….

All that flooded back to me this morning, as I heard this morning’s snowplow scraping down our street. I didn’t have my camera at-hand (dang it) so I just ran to our window and hung out as it came by then back down the street, its lights also subtly illuminating the early morning darkness, and I again mused that maybe…perhaps…it was again just me and that snowplow driver being the only ones awake at this hour on this section of street, on this frigid, snowy December morning….