I'm just grateful that we have had thaws in between the snowstorms this year. In past years, we haven't, and the mounds of plowed/shoveled snow in my very small, typical, old New England front yard were over 6 feet high. Shoveling is just that much harder when you have to either walk 20 feet to fling the snow into an area that doesn't already have several feet of snow on it, or you have to throw it over your head to get the snow on top of a huge mound of packed snow. There's probably about 3 feet of snow in the front yard, most of it plowed there. The rest of the yard has about 2-3 inches. Three or four winters a ago, there were no thaws and a lot of snow. Our first floor windows on the front of the house looked out onto 8 foot high snow banks for months.

All the parking lots at shopping centers and such have huge mountains of snow, making it challenging to enter and exit aisles of parking spaces. But it is fun to watch the snow mountains melt come April or May, and see what emerges from them. Shopping carts, trash barrels, umbrellas, once I even saw a desk--how that got into a parking lot to be plowed up, I have no idea.