As you probably know, New Jersey is one of the 49 states to get snow in the recent snow storm. At my house we probably got 30-36 inches in total over a four day period. Ugh.
The skies have been clear for about five days now, and although there’s no snow in the forecast there’s plenty of it on the ground. So I’ve been drawing on the lessons I learned in Ms. McCarty’s 4th grade class at Driscoll Elementary.
There’s no way I’m hauling shovelfulls of wet, icy snow from one side of my driveway to another. Instead I’ve been simply throwing the snow into the street… onto the clear, black asphalt. Warm, toasty, sun’s energy absorbing black asphalt. I flick the snow onto the street, kick any clumps into smaller wisps of snow and watch them melt almost instantly and flow back into the gutters.
By the time I finished my most recent round of doing this, all the snow had melted and I’d cleared another 54 cubic feet of snow from in front of my house. (That’s an 18 foot wide, 1.5 foot deep rectangle of snow extending two feet from the curb, if you’re scoring at home.)
It’s tiring and my back hurts from all the twisting and throwing, but I’m pleased to have been able to apply the lesson I learned back when we put a piece of black felt and a piece of white felt on the snow and watched the black felt sink about a foot into the snow over the course of a day back in 1978.
Thank you Ms. McCarty (and “Gifted and Talented” supplemental instruction teacher, Ms. Safran), you taught me well.
Contributed by: Scott Copperman
Tags: By Scott Copperman