After the snow subsided and the winds calmed down, cold air slid its hand over the city and squeezed hard, ensuring that the tall piles at every corner and narrow paths temporarily standing in for sidewalks would be around for a while.
To be fair, most sidewalks in my neighborhood were passable after a couple of days, with the notable exception of one stretch alongside a yellow-brick warehouse that, apparently, contains zero shovels, turning a walk along its side into something more like flying through one of the canyons on the Death Star--treacherous and nothing even remotely resembling fun.
During this time, the city lopped a couple of tenths of an inch off of the official storm total, which downgraded it to an even 20 inches and fourth place on our all-time blizzard list. (At the same time, the Blizzard of 1979, which shut down Chicago Public Scolls for a week--I was a high school freshman at the time--and chased mayor Michael Bilandic out of office a few weeks later, was upgraded slightly. Don't ask me how you remeasure a 32-year-old snowstorm--I couldn't tell you.)
Also during this time, the city finally wearied of citizen marking their parking spaces with lawn chairs, storage containers and baby carriages long after the flakes had stopped falling. trucks were sent up and down residential streets, gathering the markers and carting them away.( And rightly so--I abhor the practice to begin with, but keeping the markers out there two weeks after the fact is seriously overly territorial.)
Finally, after about a week or so, temperature rose first above freezing, then above normal, then way above normal, topping out last Thursday at an official high of 58 (a few degrees shy of the record high for the day) and unofficial highs exceeding 60 degrees in some areas. This went a long way toward melting what remained from the storm, reducing the mounds the height of my head to little more than smallish blackened Rorschach tests of the pavement.
Is that the end of the story? Of course not. It snowed last night. It snowed this morning. It can snow here well into April and even early May.Winter's not done with us yet--even if we were done with it some time ago.
1 comment:
Once the Christmas holidays are over, I abhor the winter season. Yes, I'm one of those people who would choose a hot and humid summer day over a below-zero or snowy day. I love Chicago, but I'd gladly be a hermit or live elsewhere from January until April.
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