I looked out my back door this morning and winter revealed itself in full glory, shaking its frozen dandruff all over like a Times Square party. About an inch had accumulated by the time I glimpsed it and I was glad I got a new snow shovel about a month ago.

Snow shovels are such necessary items when you live in the northern climes. There are so many from which to choose. Most of the ones I saw when shopping were made of plastic. PLASTIC??!!! Guaranteed to break after one season, you mean? I wanted a shovel that would do the job for many seasons. You could throw money at the problem but even the high-end, cleverly designed for ease of use, etc., were made of materials that would not stand the test of time.

Back in the early 1980’s I was boarding during a hiatus from the road band work I’d been doing. It was a nice break–hotel rooms, the food, the nightclubs, the road, the people, band mates, and all that blur into a treadmill and it can get old pretty quick.

My keyboard player, Lawrence Hess, a few years younger than I and gifted with musical talent as well as perfect pitch (he could tell you what tone that fart was), had joined another band and was traveling. His father, Lawrence senior, gave me a cot up in their attic and there I stayed for several months until Lawrence junior returned from the band that had crashed and burned.

(This was a pivotal point in my life because, with Lawrence and a gifted drummer named Russel Yohe, we then began a road trip that lasted several years as a trio called “Pure Magic.” More later . . . )

My duties in the household, a way to earn my keep, included stacking and moving firewood around (they had a Franklin stove in their living room that heated the entire building), shoveling snow and just about anything else Lawrence senior could think of. I cleaned and pointed his chimney during that time.

Old man Hess had a couple of coal shovels, one of which I used as a snow shovel. The handle had a T-shaped grip and you could shovel a lot of snow with it. Ordinary snow shovels have a straight handle and sometimes balancing a big shovel full of snow, due to the lopsided weight, can be problematic because the handle rotates in your wet gloves  and dumps the cargo back on the sidewalk.

I never forgot that little lesson. Coal shovels are made of steel and in consequence are fairly heavy. I was young then and the exercise was good for me.

So, there on the rack at WalMart, I spied what a sticker called a “scoop.” I believe it could also have been called a “grain shovel,” as the scoop was made of aluminum. It had a short T grip like the coal shovels but it was plastic so I rejected it at the time.

I shopped around a little more, going to hardware stores, etc., and most of them didn’t even have coal shovels, let alone a grain shovel. So I went back to WalMart, swallowed my pride, and bought the scoop, plastic handle and all. It cost about $30, the median price for a plastic “snow” shovel.

Today my new shovel, “the Iceman,” had its baptism of fire ( 😀 ) as I shoveled the 25-30 yard walk from my back door to the parking lot where I park my car. The shovel was light and so was the snow and I removed about 2 inches of snow from the walk in about 15 minutes. I’ll have to repeat that in a bit as it’s still snowing.

If I could have found my ideal shovel the handle would have been longer, the short handle of my new shovel makes me stoop a little. Being metal, snow stuck to it and I had to give it a little tap to unload it into the yard. Those issues are small negatives in my mind and, though I’m not so young these days, I can still use the exercise. I expect to have that shovel for a long time–at least until the plastic handle breaks! (I’m told there are no snow shovels in hell, so that will be a relief!)

I wrote a little poem about how I feel about snow and it appears on the poetry page of this blog. Check it out, it’s cute.

S’all for now . . .