Downtown Springfield takes snow like an old stage set: the Old State Capitol square gone soft and white, the streetlights still burning, not a footprint on the brick until somebody makes the first one. That first one is usually a shovel. Clearing runs through the small hours — drives and lots opened, sidewalks cut to their full width so two people can pass, salt worked into the stair treads where melt keeps refreezing. Snow gets moved to where it will not block a doorway or a sightline, because half of this work is deciding where to put it. Later, when the sidewalks fill up and nobody looks down, the job has done exactly what it was for.