Life in a Small Town
Written by Stephanie Dixon (1998)

It's winter, and it's a snowbelt here in St.Thomas Ontario. We apparently live in the same snow belt as Buffalo NY. I've never lived in a snow-belt before. Fruit belt, yes, snow belt, no. We have however had more snow than some of the long term residents have ever seen before. It is a mess! The snow on my front lawn is waist-deep. The neighbor across from me (I'm going to assume that she is a native of St.Thomas) owns a mustang. A mid-eighties Mustang- with something close to racing skins for tires and nothing in the way of a muffler. For the past week she has had trouble getting in and out of her driveway as her landlord has not plowed it. She will repeatedly pull into her driveway and sit there futilely spinning her tires- once she even bounced off the house next to hers. Good thing there was a snow buffer between her and the house. It is a shared drive, and the other neighbor has had trouble too. So mustang-woman then decided to park her car on the road choosing to risk getting a ticket for parking overnight rather than try to get into her driveway.

This one night she came over to borrow my shovel. It is something like -17 degrees here and she was wearing a Tommy Hillfiger spring shell jacket. Good Grief!

She has been asked to move her car by all the neighbors, so we can get our street plowed, and responded that she would rather get a ticket on the street than shell out for snow tires (which she would apparently need to get into her driveway). Her boyfriend was asked if he could please ask her to move her car so that we could get our street plowed; he allegedly laughed, got in his car, and drove away. Of course this has been a little more than frustrating for my neighbors. I'm new here, but I can see that they are a very polite bunch, and are very concerned that they don't inconvenience anyone. I think that her not understanding that her car on the road means we don't get plowed has been the root of the problem the whole time, but I can't say for sure.

Anyway, my neighbor has called the police because her car- being parked on the side of what's left of our street has forced the plows to turn around and not plow our street. This meant that our neighbor had to do a lot of shoveling to get his car out this morning. He piled the snow on top of her car. My other neighbor who is fortunate enough to have a snow-blower blew all of the snow from his (very long) shared drive right onto her car! It looked like a little snow hill this morning with a little bit of blue metallic paint sticking out of the side of it.

So the police show up, and tell my neighbor that although it has been sitting there for two days, it presently is not presenting a problem as cars can still (just) get by, but he would take down her license plate number and have the night shift come by to check on it and ticket it if necessary.

Later on the same day, I suppose that the plow really needed to get through our street (we are downtown) and her car of course, was "gumming up the whole project", and the cop came back and told her she had to move the stang asap. So, mustang-woman gets out there, and is spinning, and kicking up a racket (muffler), the cop is pushing her car and gets it unstuck about 4 feet from where she was parked, at which point she runs out of gas. Stang-womans stang is now smack dab in the middle of the road, up to the axles in snow, no gas, cop trying to push her, neighbors coming out of their homes to see what's going on and still wearing the little spring Tommy Hillfiger shell jacket!

Mustang woman comes over to borrow my phone this afternoon, and I graciously let her in the house, and don't realize until afterward that she has a lit cigarette in her hand. She didn't even ask if it was okay! I thought she would take the phone (cordless) and go outside with it- nope. She smoked a whole cigarette in my HOUSE!! And she stood there shivering in my doorway still wearing the goddamn Tommy Hillfiger Jacket!!

Um, so I'm not trying to say that all small town people are like this, but what's up with that?!?!?!