Peter Costa: Dancing in a winter wonderland

I have lectured, cajoled, even told hero-myth stories to my family to illustrate how important it is not to step on the stairs and compress the snow into impossible-to-shovel ice clumps. All to no avail. The top platform looked as if it had served as a rehearsal stage for "Dancing with the Stars."

This abnormally harsh fall-winter season is generating dangerously high current surges in my brain.

When it was snowing 2 inches per hour recently, my snow thrower grew short of breath and passed out. Of course, it broke down at the farthest end of my driveway. Its black handles stuck out of the now like a ghost skier. I had no other option but to leave the thrower and trek back through the knee-high snow and retrieve a can of starting fluid. After huffing and puffing, I found the can and slogged my way back to the disabled machine.

I managed to remove my snow-thrower gloves, which I had pulled up to my elbows and about as easy to take off in the wind and cold as removing a tick from an angry grizzly bear. I fumbled with the air filter nut, removed it and the air filter and prepared to spray the starting fluid into the carburetor for a hot start. Nothing happened. I pressed the little red nozzle top again and sure enough it sprayed right onto my chest.

After several attempts, I succeeded in getting the ether into the carb. I pulled the ice-encrusted start handle on the snow thrower and the snow thrower roared to life. Perhaps it was not exactly the roar of a lion, but it could have been the sound from an angry bobcat. Nevertheless, the machine ran long enough for me to finish the driveway.

But by the time I had pushed it back into its berth in the garage, about an inch of snow had blanketed the areas I had just cleaned. I don't remember this happening when I was a kid. Usually, after one had shoveled the driveway, it stayed shoveled. Are these start-and-stop storms a result of global warming or are the Norse gods angry with me? What have I done, oh powerful Woden?

Next task was to shovel the front steps. Now, I have lectured, cajoled, even told hero-myth stories to my family to illustrate how important it is not to step on the stairs and compress the snow into impossible-to-shovel ice clumps. All to no avail. The top platform looked as if it had served as a rehearsal stage for "Dancing with the Stars."

Lucky for me, I have inherited a square, steel shovel that was used to shovel coal, circa 1934. It is large and has a worn wooden handle. A very non-Green device, this fossil fuel-feeding implement could be used as evidence in a lawsuit by the Environmental Protection Agency. It is the kind of shovel you see in old movies, in engine rooms aboard ships and on trains. You could stoke a fire with only two swings of this shovel.

It works particularly well on stairs. I placed it on the edge of the ice and stepped on the shovel with all my holiday-cookie-enhanced weight. Sure enough, the ice gave way and the sharp steel cut across the stair and swept the ice onto the bank. Hurray for the inventor of the coal shovel.

Now comes the arduous process of salting and sanding. I used to use, until yesterday, a long-handled plastic scoop to meter out the ice melt pellets. This scoop works well inside a 25-pound bag but not so well in a smaller diameter bucket. My garage floor is covered with ice melt pellets that have spilled out of the scoop by accident. Now I use a metal cup. This fits easily into the little plastic pail I carry and I feel like Paul Bunyan spreading apple seeds as I broadcast sow the pellets onto the stairs.

The icy driveway requires sand. This process I do with a small shovel. I spread the sand in great arcs and sprays and it looks like a badly done Jackson Pollock painting. Later, during the alleged January thaw, this sand will turn to mud and will be tracked into the house guaranteeing me a counter-lecture to my lecture about where to step and when.

I retired thinking my cleanup work is done. During the night, the town plow slid by and left a hedgerow of snow that would have stopped Panzer tanks during the Battle of the Bulge. The coal shovel again comes to my rescue. After stepping on the shovel and cutting the bank into igloo-sized snow blocks, I haul them away with help of a double-runner sled that I saved from the 1950s.

I'm all set now - at least until January when real winter comes.

Peter Costa is a senior editor with Community Newspaper Company. His book, "CostaLiving: Laughing through Life," a collection of his humor columns, is available at amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble bookstores.