It looks like snow, but it isn’t. Not a single flaky beauty in there. It’s layer upon layer of this icy concoction, a Midwestern specialty known for late February arrivals. It’s tiny balls of ice, the same size exactly as those little styrofoam balls you get the first and only time you let your child play with and explore the corner guards in your DVD packaging. But these are not soft, they don’t float, they don’t cling – instead they pelt, sideways at 8 mph, into your stinging face as you chisel. It’s twelve hours of this and the silver fine ice dust, the miniature freezing daggers, the wash of large droplets that spread over the glass, uniting with all the other droplets into an instantaneous wall of white, at a rate that requires stopping and chiseling, no matter how warm the inside of the car is. Chisel, chisel. The sound starts way before dawn, our neighbor who drives a bus. The sound echos between these tall, hard buildings, amplified by their proximity, our closeness to the street, our single pane windows, the lush silence of a street blanketed in ice. It rouses you from the dreams you were enjoying where you were warm, where you were light, where you could emerge from your shell without the tenseness of expectation for cold. Where your daughter does not ask again for the two hundredth time, why is this season sooo long? Chisel, chisel. You know it’s your turn soon to scrape, you’ve made this urban bed and you have to sleep in it. No forty degree garage attached to the house that gives you a jump start on your commute, the only ice in sight being the puddles that dripped off the car overnight onto the floor. The internal alarm clock is all mixed up – moments of half opened eyes reveal a room as bright as dawn, reflections from that single street light magnified by each individual pellet of cold. The street is waking up to the second round today, the sounds are idling cars, then spinning tires as the cars moan and groan themselves out of the icy ruts that molded around their four tires, looking for some heat and some shelter and some relief from the new showers that have started again and cover the old with a new layer of glazed treachery. It is the cruelest of all Winter’s tricks, turning the longing for Spring into a dull, aching pain of near acceptance that she, perhaps, is not even stopping by.