OK, so I’ll show you what I was doing last weekend. Shoveling snow off the roof in Casco, because the snow was deep enough that we were (or at least I was) worried about the roof collapsing. It’s just the roof over the addition to the house, one story high, that’s a gentle enough slope to worry a lot about snow sticking to it. And of course there’s snow on the ground, too, so there’s less distance to fall — but there was enough snow on the roof to form a parapet anyway, and I worked from the middle out towards the edge and got totally worn out before I got within three feet of the edge in any direction. There’s a window from the loft out over the roof. I climbed out, so there was no ladder in the picture. I actually quite enjoyed being up there, looking out over the snow-covered side yard and raspberry patch.
You can see the whole history of the winter in the layers of crust there. It’s tough to get a snow shovel through all the crusts. I brought up the ice chopper — it’s sort of like a hoe but with the blade in line with the handle instead of at right angles to it — and cut out a six-inch square at a time.
The best thing about clearing snow off a roof is that you don’t have to lift the shovel up a whole lot, just fling the snow sideways and listen to it thump on the ground a lot later. The bad thing is that the path that I shoveled for the oil delivery driver to get to the oil filler pipe is below that part of the house, so I had to shovel some of the roof snow twice.
Yes, the snow is deep. The clothesline, a little overhead in the summer, is now only waist high when you’re standing on top of the snow next to it.