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I am probably torturing the analogy, but, just last night we had these "no parking due to snow removal" temporary signs that the city here throws up the odd morning over winter, the first time our little side road has had them this year. It means a series of giant vehicles will smash through your neighbourhood over night to remove the snow that has accumulated along the edges of the roads. By this time here, the piles were a good 4 feet high and more or less a solid icy mass below the first few inches, making parking and driving difficult and a one-way affair.

We just moved here, so I thought I would watch how it worked and go to bed after, since it would be loud anyway. There was, first, an enormous tractor thingy that drove down the side of the road at full speed (once per side) and simply obliterated the ice banks, flinging the hardened snow into the middle of the street. Then, a teensy one-seater (at a more reasonable speed) calmly pushed the remaining crumbs into the pile. Our street now featured a new ice median that made one side unpassable (barring creative sidewalk driving) for the next hour or two. Then, some other kind of truck came along to vaccum the ice median up and cart it to the snow dump (I missed this one, as I was in bed by then and our bedroom window doesn't face the street; but it was still loud enough to wake me up).

I dunno. Something tortured there about the process of undoing love, or grief.

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