The Second Season

Dearest Rachel –

To the best of my knowledge, you didn’t have to deal with it much back in your hometown, but once you moved to live up with me in the Chicago suburbs, you learned fairly quickly about how the area basically has two seasons; winter, and construction. No matter where you wanted to drive in the area, if you weren’t slogging through enough snow to require a fleet of salt trucks and plows (often the same vehicle), there would be at least one street one your route that would be littered with orange cones and heavy machinery indicating that it was being worked on. In some cases, this seemed to be more “allegedly” being worked on – our annual trips to AnimeIowa, for instance, often saw us driving by miles of such roadside ornamentation, but there was almost never a worker to be seen as we passed through. Maybe this was due to us making our way back on a late Sunday afternoon, but that offered no excuse for their absence on our trip out on Friday morning.

I should point out that the first season tends to be partially responsible for the second; the water that seeps into cracks in the road freezes during the winter, and expands, making those crack grow that much bigger and more treacherous come the following spring. A few cycles of the regular seasons up here – especially given that these roads get a lot more wear and tear than they do where you’re from – and it’s no wonder that they need repairs on a regular basis. It’s just such a nuisance having to deal with the bottlenecks the repairs create.

Especially when they’re literally happening right outside our door.

In fact, this has been going on since before I got home from my trip; they’ve been working on the street since late March, apparently. And to their credit, you can see that the outside lane has actually been completed, with the smooth blacktop perfectly visible in the picture. However, when you’re pulling out of the driveway and you have to be careful not to hit this or that enormous truck as you do, you’re far more conscious of what’s being done as opposed to what has been done. The smooth surface beneath your tires doesn’t get your attention anywhere near as much as that of these huge vehicles in front of you (or worse, for those without turnaround driveways like ours, in back of you).

The saving grace is that these vehicles are moving at a fairly good clip; they were in front of the office complex a block further north as I was making my way back from the fitness center this morning. So by the time I drive home from the office this afternoon, it’s entirely possible they’ll have finished their task of ripping out the two center lanes and left the area. Of course, that still means there are going to be these two lanes of road in the middle of our street that have had their surface layer torn off, leaving us with a bumpy road to cross when we’re driving home from the north and needing to turn left to get into our driveway. And it may yet be a couple of months before the repaving is done; that blacktop you see in the above photo hadn’t been laid by the time I returned home from the cruise, and they were presumably some six or seven weeks into the project at that point. So who knows when they’ll have this portion of the job taken care of; it always takes longer to build up than to tear down, after all.

Still, once it’s done, it shouldn’t need any work to speak of for quite some years to come. Maybe by then, I won’t even be there anymore, except to visit Daniel every now and again. Who knows? All I do hope, though, is that they’ll have this taken care of before the first season returns, otherwise it’s going to be a long and difficult winter to navigate.

And with that being said, honey, keep an eye on me (and maybe the construction crew, too), and wish us all luck. We’re going to need it, I shouldn’t wonder.