On Topic: Residential real estate

Our driveway at home here in Cedar Rapids is approximately

15 yards long, tops. About the length of a decent RV camper, plus change.

This is a paramount component in my worldview in regard to residential real estate. Up until last winter, when my wife and I moved here to Eastern Iowa, where we lived was defined by the length of our driveway.

By which I mean how much snow had to be moved from it, some way or another, each winter.

For some 14 years we lived less than a half-hour from the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The significance of the Big Lake's proximity cannot be understated.

When cold air moves across that huge, relatively warmer surface area of water - more or less the size of West Virginia - it creates what is innocently called Lake Effect snow.

And that, my friends, is what I'm talking about. On average, Lake Effect snow can generate 74 to 80 inches of snow a year in southwest Michigan.

When it really puts its mind to it, during a particularly punishing winter it can push nearer to 90 inches.

And when these storms come, they make their presence known, dumping snow for hours, seemingly days. I recall many times shoveling in the morning before leaving for work, going home at midday to shovel again so the snow wouldn't be so high in the evening when - you guessed it - I'd need to get out there once more.

One other key element to snowfall near the lakefront is that it can be heavy. Not that cute, fluffy stuff you see on the “Peanuts” animated cartoon Christmas special, but back-wrenchingly dense.

This snow also brings on your white-outs, your blizzards, your mass business and school closings and your spectacular traffic pileups, as well as the at-least-twice annual frantic warnings and/or threats from the Highway Patrol for every sane person to “stay indoors and, for heaven's sake, don't go out unless you have to. What's wrong with you people, anyway?”

Many a Thanksgiving and Christmas get-together became an iffy proposition, with its buildup devoted to frequent ominous phone calls (“Well, we'd like to come, but only if Al can get that old snowblower started, and his heart holds out”), monitoring the Weather Channel and straining to hear the distant rumble-thump-grind of approaching city snow plows.

I think it was our first winter in the giant, drafty old house we'd purchased when I tugged open the garage door to discover glistening white snow stacked up to my thighs.

At the time, we owned one flimsy snow shovel.

Getting the driveway and accompanying sidewalks even remotely passable that day took the better part of the daylight hours. Lisa gamely pitched in for a while, deploying a light blue kitchen dust pan - with practice, she was able to fling snow in clumps of, say, 6-by-8 inches per pan-full.

Over time - as hardware stores began to restock after the predictable run on snow-removal merchandise - we accumulated more snow shovels. We eventually possessed one shovel for each expected type of snow:

•  A red standard dig-and-lift shovel

•  A green scoop-shaped shovel for pushing less-heavy snow off to the side (no actual lifting involved)

•  A pointy-edged yellow shovel for smacking along the sidewalk, in desperate hopes of chipping the ice

•  A black ergonomic shovel that - I assume jokingly - claims to help the shoveler's lower back. (Ha.)

I also bought a roof rake, an amazing device that's essentially a series of endless connectible poles attached to a small metal wedge with rollers. From the ground, you angle the wedge end up onto your roof, then gently pull the snow down. (Yes, just as much of the snow thumps down on top of you as onto the ground.)

It was not until July of that year that the big-box retailers began to display snowblowers on their sales floors. (Yes, July - remember where we're talking about.)

I bought one on first sight. Not the biggest available, but not the smallest, either.

On good winter days, that snowblower would do the trick, zipping down our driveway and along the sidewalk, cheerfully spewing smoke and noise with abandon. (I tried to block out of my mind all the environmental issues this threw up and all my readings of Rachel Carson: It was the snow or me.)

But on remarkably heavy days - and there were plenty - and as the machine itself aged, the chore got tougher. Many a time, that big-hearted device would get clogged with fat, wet snow, and I'd have to shut it off, then jam a stick - oh, all right, I admit it: my hand - down the chute to punch and gouge out the cold stuff.

Or it would simply gasp and stall, the task too deep for it to surmount.

Only days before the moving van arrived to carry our stuff from Michigan to Cedar Rapids that poor snowblower breathed its last breath.

I was using it to clear the drive for the movers when suddenly there was a small boof!, a burst of flames, then billowing black smoke. Then silence ….

It died, as they say, in harness.

But, you know, better it than me.