I love hate love hate love hate snowplows.
It’s complicated.
Without the snowplows, our road looked like this:
And while I love the beauty of the snow, we were running low on milk being snowed in gets really old after more than 3 or 4 days, so I was truly glad to see the arrival of the first snowplows.
About a week after the first snowplows — the ones that made it possible for us to be free once again — this machine made it’s way through my neighborhood:
It’s one of the big guns from the Department of Transportation.
Gone is the compact snow and ice, but the road itself has been gouged by the heavy machinery.
Scars remain on and off the road.
scarred pavement
The damage from the snow and ice met the work of the heavy equipment on parts of our road. I doubt there will be any money available to fix these problems for quite some time. The county and the state had budget troubles before our winter of historical storms.
Sometimes the plows scrape more than just the road. Plenty of people will have yard repair work this Spring. This clump of sod probably came from a neighbor’s yard.
Got Mail?
And sometimes the plow doesn’t come close to the edge of the road at all — good for the preservation of their lawn, but it clearly was a determent for the mail carrier. I was impressed by the resourcefulness of these residents.
Our snow is slowly melting away. The gritty, gray mess on the edge of the roadways is ugly to look at, but the slow melt is preferred over worries of flooding.
And when the snow has finally melted, I do hope for a cleansing rain.
Kcinnova's World 
We don’t plow roads here. The state gets the main roads, but in town they salt most of the roads and just hope that it warms up soon.
But, on the plus side, we don’t have all that nasty, dirty snow piled up at the ends of our driveways either.
Jay, we aren’t inside the town limits (and those that were definitely were plowed out before we were) and I think they ran out of salt! 😛
The nasty, dirty snow is all along main street in town. I wouldn’t go eating most of ours, but it’s not that bad in front of my house.
Ya know until you see this and read about it you never think about all of this. I couldn’t live with that. Come to think of it I don’t and I”m glad. They are beautiful pictures and thanks for sharing. I feel for ya !
Oh, but Thom — it was so beautiful! 😉
You can have your (THANKFULLY very mild) tsunami; I’ll take a record-breaking storm. 😀
We have curbs so the plows do not injure lawns. Our roads get done (sealed and potholes filled) every spring/summer to fix what winter did. But we don’t get those highway rigs on our local streets like you do!
Karen, I’d never before seen such big rigs off the highway! The DOT contracts a lot of work to guys with plows attached to their pickup trucks, and I think too many of them couldn’t handle the magnitude of the storms. School has been back in session for 2 weeks now, but there are still roads that are inaccessible for the school buses according to the district website. I think we would have been out of school for a 3rd week if that huge plow hadn’t come through our area — we probably had 3 inches of compact snow and ice on our road and the daily melt and refreezing would have made early morning travel very difficult.
Yea… ME too. Ours look JUST like yours… the MOUNTAINS are getting smaller though…
The mountain in back of H-J is in our church parking lot. The county uses it for a commuter lot, so we were lucky to have it plowed.
Humorous-Juniorous is 5’8″ and I think the “mountain” was close to 14 feet at its full height.
I’m with you on being thankful for the SLOW melt – I have enough water seeping into my cellar as it is. Once all of it melts I’ll have to go see how far down the road the plows deposited the gravel from the shoulder of the road in front of the house. If it’s not too far, I’ll be taking a shovel and wheelbarrow to retrieve it…
Sorry to hear about your cellar and your gravel!
I hope Spring arrives for you soon!
You know if the snow plows got closer and mowed down a mailbox, there’d be even more screaming and yelling. They just can’t win.
Oh, I know it — that’s why we were one of 3 households in our neighborhood to put up markers along the road. Those who didn’t are sorry now…
I’d rather shovel out the mailbox than repair lawn damage — and yes, we had to shovel out our mailbox!
I like snow. I enjoyed the snowfall in 2008/09 here (thanks to two sons with 4 wheel drive vehicles). I would not have been happy with the amount dumped at your house.
I’m thinking of you and your view as I look out at the daffodils almost in bloom, and the crocus, and forsythia in bloom in our back yard.
Hugs!