Philadelphia had a good deal of snow Sunday, as did pretty much everyone in our part of the world, and because Philadelphia rarely gets large quantities of snow, every heavy snowfall ends up being an emergency.

It was soft, fluffy snow for the first half, and then sleet, but it never got really heavy, not like 1996, when we got over 30″–or even 2016, when the city got 22″. It was just 9″. Not even a foot. People panicked anyway; I took a bus to a meeting early on Sunday morning, and a room that normally has fifty people in it had four, total.

I shoveled my front walk four times on Sunday and once on Monday (my neighbor finished up for me) and that was pretty much it for my part in snow removal. We are required by law to clear our front walks within six hours of a snowfall. It wasn’t hard.

Then the low temperatures began, And Philadelphia, a city that rarely gets much snow, wasn’t really prepared for the masses that remained. School got cancelled for three days in a row–or rather, students went “remote,” which is an unlovely legacy of the active COVID response. I get it; schools are partly funded based on how they achieve attendance, and are always under pressure for students to pass tests, so they are eternally making sure students make it in. When I taught, the students who missed a lot of school often didn’t do well, but there were a lot of reasons for that and correlation doesn’t equal causation.

My street got plowed pretty early, anyway; it’s right off a “snow route” and it’s wide enough for most plows to get through, but a lot of Philadelphia streets are too narrow for a regular plow. My adult kid’s street, for instance, is still a rutted mass of ice.

But people couldn’t get in and out of their parking spaces, because they were plowed in (Philadelphians have way too many cars for a city with a reasonably robust public transportation system, and not enough places to put them), and the plows made it remarkably difficult for anyone to walk. The sidewalks were all cleared early on, because, as I mentioned, residents are required to clear their walks. But the nice clear sidewalks terminated in icy, slippery, almost impassable hillocks of rigid snow. At the bus stops, passengers had to surmount frozen barriers to climb on and off. Every time some kind citizen cleared a corner, the plows came through and blocked it off again.

Meanwhile, despite the low temperatures (-14° C), the snow was steadily subliming. I discovered sublimation when I was teaching the states of matter to fourth graders; it’s when a solid turns directly into a gas. I can see it at the front of my house, where I completely covered one of my plant pots with snow; the pot is visible again.

Which is to say, by the time our city gets around to clearing all the snow, it will have largely gone. Except for the mighty plow mountains. It will remove itself. It always does.