Close quarters
Lakewood houses are packed in tight, usually with nothing but a one-lane driveway and a little strip of a flower bed separating one from the next.
Sometimes two neighboring Lakewood houses are built with adjacent driveways. That makes for a double wide drive way which—in good weather, and as long as you get along with your neighbors—can be very handy for jockeying the cars around. But in snowy weather, two adjacent driveways like that pose a special kind of problem.
Because on the one hand, you can’t shovel your snow off on the neighbor’s driveway. And you can’t shovel in the other direction because that’s where your house is.
The only solution, as anyone who has one of these driveways knows, is to shovel the snow past the house, and then pile it up in your front yard. You could hire a guy with a snowplow, if you have the money for that. But most of us in Lakewood deal with our own snow.
gathering mass
Snow shoveling under any circumstances is solid exercise. But if you’ve got to move a big pile 30 feet down the drive—making the pile bigger as you go before you shovel the whole mess off to the front yard—that’s more than just exercise. That’s what we call “hard labor.” Depending on your health, you might just be better off hiring a guy with a plow.
But let me tell you about the “snowman method” for driveway clearing.
I invented this technique the other day, when I decided to take advantage of the packing snow and the gravity of my driveway’s gentle slope. Most driveways slope down toward the street, which makes it easy to roll things that way: Kickballs, basketballs. I began near the top of the driveway, rolling a snowball down toward the bottom.
When we say something “snowballed,” we mean it grew over time, like a snowball rolling down hill, gathering more snow. This is what happens if you roll a snowball down your driveway. All that snow—all that white mass, and the labor it represents—gets caught up in the rolling. And then, in the joyous, gravity-assisted process of making a gigantic snowball, it finds its way to the bottom of the driveway.
The fully executed “snowman method”
Once I got there, I rolled the big balls off to the side and stacked them up in the yard—hence the “snowman method.”
You are hereby encouraged to try this at home.
gyroscopethattakesyouplaces 