Well, depending on whether I correctly set the clocks last night, it’s either 7:20 a.m., 8:20 a.m. or 9:20 a.m. And according to the color-coded, looping regional radar weather map on my computer, the big March snow is over.

It was a doozy. We got a foot and a half, I’d say.

Back a few days, whenever it started, I shoveled our drive by hand. The snow was light and fluffy and I made quick work of it. Yesterday afternoon I went out in the blizzard to shovel but didn’t get far. The snow was wet and heavy and I’m old and fat. You do the math as to how many minutes I was out there.

My son-in-law runs a landscaping business and does snow in the winter. But I can’t count on him. He’s too busy with his paying customers to give the father of his beautiful bride a freebie. Actually, he’ll be working around the clock for days cleaning out all of the parking lots he’s got under contract.

So, I kept my fingers crossed last night hoping the young guy across the street would do our drive. He’s got a pick-up with a blade and does it part-time after his day job. About nine o’clock he showed up and now all is well with the world. We’ll be able to get out of the drive this morning and take a nice Boston Market dinner to Carol’s parents.

All this got me thinking about some of the big snows I’ve lived through.

When I was twelve, we had a huge storm that isolated tiny Bennett’s Corners from the rest of the world for several days. I remember sledding on the road in front of our farm. The local storekeeper had to walk five miles to open up. His shelves were bare in a few hours.

Then there was that storm in 1978 (or 1977, or 1979, who can remember). Not only was there three feet of snow, it was below zero for days and the high winds made huge drifts that literally buried houses. The only vehicles on the roads were National Guard tanks and halftracks.

The most memorable snow for me was in November 1974. Wife No. 1 and I went to Knoxville to spend Thanksgiving with her relatives. In our rusted out pea-green Ford Pinto. A car we shouldn’t have taken out of the driveway let alone 500 miles to Tennessee. Our daughter, Jenifer, was just a year old. On the way home we got socked with one of those big snows out of the southwest, like the one that got us this weekend. We got stuck on I-71 for 27 hours, down by Mansfield somewhere. There were hundreds of cars and trucks stuck with us. A caravan going nowhere.

Everyone stayed in their cars during the night, running their engines off and on to stay warm. In the morning people crawled out to look around. People started talking. Seeing if anybody needed help. When the word spread that we had a baby, people came to our car with food and milk.

Hours passed. People were getting desperate. Then a truck driver opened the back of his semi trailer and started throwing out apples and pears. Beautiful apples and pears individually wrapped in red and green tissue paper for Christmas. “If they don’t like it, they can fire me,” he said.

That snow, as scary as it was, goes down as my favorite. And my favorite Thanksgiving. Several hundred strangers, white and black, young and old, some in Cadillacs, some in Pintos, looking out for each other, sharing what they had.