Inspired by Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights,” last year I set off on a 365-day journey. Like Ross Gay, I would journal each day for a year, beginning the day after my birthday, but instead of writing about things that delighted me, my entries could be about any topic as long as they followed one rule: each day’s reflections had to include the word “water”. I was surprised how many – yes, delightful – roads that took me down!

The journal project ended a month ago, but yesterday I decided to peek at my 2023 Halloween entry. With the year’s first possibility of snow in the forecast, I was surprised to see that snow was in the air last year too. With a little bit of tidying, I’m passing this back to you. If you want more details on our magical driveway device, let me know!

31 October 2023

We awoke to snow today. Not all that much – just enough to turn all horizontal surfaces white, and to make walking treacherous all day. PTSD is real.[i]

I’m told that in 1991 there was a real Halloween storm here. The weather started off grey and drizzly, but by the time All Souls Day started there was deep snow underlain by inches of rutted slush, now ice. Because forecasting in 1991 wasn’t what it is today, the dump took everyone by surprise, and now every Minneapolitan older than 45 remembers “when.” Apparently, Thanksgiving that year followed suit.

Today’s snow wasn’t nearly so dramatic, though some drivers still ended up in the ditch. This afternoon, about two hours before sunset, I returned from (slowly, carefully) walking our two dogs, and noticed the ice covering our north-facing front steps, walks, and driveway. Kids are resilient and bounce easily, especially when wrapped in winter coats and Halloween costumes, but I still didn’t want anyone to slip while trick-or-treating, so I spread a scant layer of sand squirreled away from city bins a year or two ago.

Our driveway is blessedly short and slopes gently toward the public sidewalk. At that hour, of it was covered in a patchwork of crunchy snow and bits of ice where we’d compacted the flakes with our steps or bicycle tires (my husband is undaunted by winter). In places the sun had managed to reach, the ice was dangerously slick.  But I couldn’t help but notice that the stretch of city sidewalk that crossed the base of our driveway was bone dry. The ice stopped abruptly at the base, leaving that 20 feet stretch of sidewalk unscathed. Why would this be?

The answer had to be the French drain-type device that runs across the foot of our driveway. Co-opting an idea from our Milwaukee friends Susan and Michael, five years earlier our son Girard sawed out a 6” band across the base of the driveway. A hired landscape crew then dug a trench in the new opening, lined it with landscape fabric, laid in a perforated pipe, and filled remaining gaps with 1” river stone.  In this new configuration, water runs down the driveway, into the pipe and off into our raingarden (or the ground itself) rather than into the street, storm sewer, and Lake Harriet. Today I learned that it also provides a bit of safety in winter!

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[i] It had been less than eleven months since I slipped on invisible ice, precipitating a visit to the ER and subsequent surgery for a broken right wrist. This was almost an exact repeat of a fall I took while walking across campus to a physics exam in December of my freshman year of college nearly fifty years earlier.