Sweeper

Last night's snow wasn't much — only about 1 cm — but it was cold enough that when I got up this morning, it had iced up on the porch, and it took a lot of scrubbing with the heavy broom to break it up and mostly clear the porch. This kind of scrubbing is part of the reason we have to repaint the porch every other year or so.

Later in the morning, I finished sweeping the sidewalks for the exercise. A woman passing by walking her dog asked me how I liked the snow. I said I didn't mind it; besides, there wasn't much of it. She said that she was from California where they don't have snow. I told her that I am also from California, but in my case from a small town in the Sierra Nevada where snow is not that unusual. She was slightly nonplussed by that. But I'm accustomed to people from the Central Valley or Southern California not considering the Sierra Nevada to be "really" California or that anyone actually lives there. To many of them, it's just a place where you can go skiing.

I could have skipped sweeping the walks, because most of the snow melted by the afternoon, but if you don't sweep the snow, walking on it crunches it down to ice, and while I like snow, I don't like ice. I've slipped on it too many times.