When I expressed this sentiment to my wife, she looked at me coldly and said, “I don’t think you’re going to have that problem.” Now that’s cold.

Anyway, it got me thinking about what method I would prefer for the handling of my remains after death. I concluded that when I die, I would prefer cremation. Part of this comes from a desire to avoid more cold. But it also seems like a clean way out: It’s cheaper, by far, than being buried in a box (another concept I don’t like much) and it avoids the decomposition problem. Cremation gets a person down to basic elements in a hurry.

And so I have given explicit instructions to my family that I am to be cremated when I die. This has created a small controversy, with the natural question of what to do with the ashes. Nobody seems too keen about keeping me around on the mantelpiece in an obelisk or pressed into an artificial diamond. Of course, they could scatter the ashes somewhere beautiful — maybe in the mountains.

But with the recent snow storms a more practical idea came to mind: Why not just keep me around for a season to perform one final act of loving service? After an especially big winter storm, just sprinkle me on the driveway to provide traction to get the car out. This idea went over much better.