Every day, more snow.

And every day, I want to do what I always used to do this time of year: dial the phone and say, “Hey, Dad, what’s it like where you are?”

Oh, I was a wicked daughter.

I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, the buckle of the snowbelt along Lake Erie, where the white stuff buried lawns around Halloween and the grass didn’t make another debut until about June.

In my hometown, spring robins showed up wearing parkas, and the ruffles of our Easter dresses flirted with the tops of chukka boots. Only a few miles west of us – where I live now, come to think of it – folks could still barbecue on the patio while we were firing up snowblowers and fighting over whose turn it was to shovel the porch.

It was the darndest thing, that lake-effect snow, and my dad hated every last flake of it.

To Dad, snow was personal, a volley from that hussy Mother Nature, who was forever poking him in the chest and taunting, “C’mon, chump.” Flurries were conniving. Squalls were sinister. Snowdrifts were just plain rude.

“Look at that, Jane,” he’d say to my mother, his freckled face still flushed from his last round of shoveling as he glared out the front window. “Look how it’s coming down, right where I just cleared a path.”

“Chuck,” she’d say as she turned over his sodden gloves on the heating vent like limp steaks on a grill. “I told you to wait until it was done snowing.”

“Pffff,” he’d say, reaching for his hat and pulling the flaps back down over his ears. He could either shovel in the dark of night or shovel in the dark of morning, but the drive had to be clear for him to get to work at the power plant. For 36 years, he was never late to the job he hated every day he was there.

There was my mother to worry about, too.

For her, he didn’t shovel, he sculpted, carving out a mountain pass for her petite and precious self.

“Make sure you pack the sides,” he’d yell at whatever hapless combination of us kids was drafted to help. “We don’t want to lose your mother!”

No matter where I lived later, there was less snow than back home, and it turned into a game over the years, my calling Dad for weather reports. Shamelessly, I turned it into a family tradition once my daughter was born.

Weatherman Dick Goddard would swing back and forth across the TV screen, chuckling with amazement that Ashtabula just got 2 feet in the last 12 minutes or so, and I’d turn to my daughter and say, “Let’s call Grandpa.”

She’d giggle as she dialed, then giggle some more as she said, “Hey, Grandpa, we got 2 inches of snow here. What’s it like where you are?”

Inevitably, her eyes grew wide as saucer sleds as her grandfather told her about the reindeer that just mistook his back yard for the North Pole.

“Elves everywhere!” he’d grouse.

It looks like Mother Nature has finally had her way with us, but her mischief is wasted on Ashtabula. Her nemesis is gone. His heart stopped last spring, only days after he’d started clearing out the brush in his flower beds.

Like anyone who grieves, I’ve had plenty of times when something happened in the last year and immediately I’d imagine my father’s response to it all. Last month, for example, whenever someone commented on how mild a December we were having, I could hear his retort: “Nah, she’s just saving it up. Trickin’ us, is all.”

This week, he would have left a two-word message on my voice mail: “Told ya.” What I wouldn’t give to hear that instead of his last two messages, which I still can’t bring myself to erase.

In the fall, my sisters were packing up my father’s home when they found something they knew I had wanted for a long time. My very first column in this space was about my father’s lunch pail. I wanted it as a reminder of how my father wore his body out so that I’d never have to, but he could never find it.

That beat-up pail sits in my home office now, right next to his hard hat.

Every day, I catch a glimpse of them before I leave.

And every day, snow or no snow, I want to ask him the same old question.

Hey, Dad, what’s it like where you are?

Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at [email protected]