Some winters here do not arrive as snow at all — they arrive as a whisper of freezing rain that glazes every branch, mailbox and step in Capital overnight. Brown Storm Service reads the sky the way people out on the county roads do, and gets ahead of the worst of it, plowing, shoveling and salting so the ice never takes hold. On the flat ground west of town the wind has nothing to slow it, and a driveway can fill twice before breakfast, which is why a route often runs more than once. Clearing a walk down to bare pavement, edge to edge, is a small and stubborn kind of hospitality. By sunup the drive is open and the day proceeds as though nothing had happened at all.