I have lived in Iowa all of my life except for one brief stint in Houston, Texas, which I blocked out like a period of missing time spent on a U.F.O. When I was a kid, I used to love it when it snowed. I loved the way the sky filled with little white flakes and at night it looked like I was flying through space while my parents drove.Of course, now that I am older and fatter and have a whole host of bad parts, the cold weather mostly means that I stare straight down at my feet for the nine or 10 months of Iowa winter. The bottom of my clodhopper boots are routinely worn thin because I don’t take steps, I slide everywhere. You have seen me or someone like me everywhere you go. As you galloped gracefully past me like an antelope blissfully unaware of your own mortality, you wondered what was up with the guy walking like an octogenarian figure skater with a brittle bone disease.I accept most of this as part of the lifestyle here in the upper Midwest. I’m not delusional or even mildly surprised at harsh weather. Quite the contrary, I am more surprised at warm winter days or cold stretches without precipitation.But what I do not accept and will never accept are these proprietors who seem to flatly refuse to cleanup their sidewalks. Up and down Lincoln Way and West St. where I live, you see business after business with packed ice out front as if they are completely unaware that we live in an extremely litigious society.I am as repulsed as anyone at the number of people who sue for no good reason, but one of the best reasons to go to court these days is still taking a header on someone else’s property. If you own a store or rental property, clean up your sidewalks. What are you people doing, some kind of cost analysis? Salt and sand are as cheap as dirt because basically that’s what they are. Spread them around. Don’t count on the humiliation factor of some poor slob assuming his tumble was his own fault when you had weeks of dry, cold weather to think about shoveling your walk but decided to let a few inches of snow get stomped into a sheet of treacherous ice instead.Do it out of the kindness of your heart. Do it because whatever religion you subscribe to says to do it. Because if you don’t and I am the guy who breaks his head on your sidewalk, I am going to sue the holy crap out of you until you don’t have to worry about owning a sidewalk any more.Perhaps I am making too much of all of this, but as I fell down my driveway five times this morning I had a revelation. Well, actually the revelation happened as I crawled on my hands and knees squealing louder than Ned Beatty at the “Deliverance” auditions while shaking Hy-Vee salt in front of me to make one spot I could stand on before crashing again for the amusement of onlookers. My revelations was this: No matter how bad the weather gets, we Iowans are descended from generations of people who have developed methods for combating even the most hideous weather conditions.I worked on a Dairy farm when I was 14 and 15, sometimes in 70 below weather birthing calves, milking cows and doing various farm work like chopping holes in the ice over frozen ponds so the cattle can drink. I do not balk at cold weather. Give me an axe, a bag of salt and a shovel, and I can turn tundra into acceptable in 20 minutes.Nobody likes shoveling, scraping and salting; that’s why most of us don’t own property. We don’t want to do all that routine, backbreaking labor it takes to make it habitable. I got a buddy whose slumlord doesn’t touch his driveway without a phone call. Word for the landowners: That piece of concrete out front of your shanties, you know that horribly cracked one with dandelions growing though it in the summer? The one you can’t see in the in the winter that people keep trying to walk on? That’s the sidewalk thingy I keep talking about. When you bought that 120-year-old house because you thought it would be cool to divide it up into seven apartments and bilk a few grand out of students to live there, it became your responsibility.Granted, our worthless student lives aren’t worth much, but our parents deserve better than to see us die in Ames, Iowa.It is not my responsibility nor that of the thousands of pedestrians who break their necks walking in front of your shops and houses to clean your sidewalks, driveways and parking lots. Pull your head out of your french frier, cool breeze. Take a break from selling meatless chili (an affront to Jesus Christ our Savior) to vegans, suck down a few extra soybeans or sneak a cheeseburger and hoist a shovel.Take five minutes out of selling grossly over-priced coffee, pasta and hummus to people too hip and/or stupid to stay home and make their own to do the real work of Iowa: shoveling snow, chopping ice and salting concrete.Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily. His lawyer can’t wait for himto fall down.