When the potholes get bad enough, repairs must be done.
That's when the city sends out teams to fill them in, one by one. The road becomes transformed from a minefield of potentially damaging pits into an annoying patchwork of asphalt bumps and dips.
The colder and harsher the winter becomes, the more often this becomes necessary. The patches don't hold long and new cracks, crevices and craters appear and multiply as the cold, sleet, snow and freezing rain permeate the asphalt and rip apart the aggregates and the unyielding road, built to withstand thousands of tons of vehicles daily, crumbles into dust.
Like fear to the soul, under an unrelenting bombardment of what ifs and predictions, conspiracies and threats, guilt and trepidation. It sinks into the cracks and crumbles our optimism, hope and faith.
But we humans are resilient and adaptable. We can weather the most frightening of circumstances and often come out even stronger for it on the other side. If we're wise we can grow and become more than we were by learning lessons from that which nearly broke us.
But sometimes the road just needs to be completely re-paved.
It has been a long, hard winter.
