The blizzard was kind enough to have shown up on Friday evening, so that when it had finished rattling our windows and dumping about ten inches of perfectly packable snow, we were not in school and had an entire day to enjoy it.

By Saturday afternoon, we had shoveled our own driveway and sidewalk. Our neighbor, Mr. Schmidt, had finished hours before, because he apparently made enough money to afford a snowblower. His was the first snowblower on our street. Mr. Schmidt felt he needed a snowblower, because he had built himself a two-car garage (also the first one on the street). The most important consequence of all this was that Mr. Schmidt's driveway was wider than anyone else's, which meant there was more snow piled up on either side of his driveway with which to build snow forts with Mr…