Mr. Bill's Land Tree Snow

About Mr. Bill's Land Tree Snow

Lake Michigan sends its winter thirty miles inland, and Grand Rapids takes it in bands — an hour of nothing, then an hour that puts down three inches. Mr. Bill's Land Tree Snow is on the road before the mains are finished, working the west-side hills and the grades where a car on worn tires simply will not make it. Driveways, alleys, the pad at the bottom of a walk-out, the strip in front of a garage door that has to open at six. In the dark the headlights carve a small bright room out of a snowstorm, and pass by pass a driveway comes back into being. By the time the city stirs, the drives are black and the banks are pushed well off the sidewalk.