You turn onto Roger Avenue. Two huge dump trucks block your way. They're aligned like the police cars that getaway drivers routinely smash out of the way in the movies. But they're enormous, and this isn't the movies.

Obligingly, one of them trundles down the road. In slow motion, its departure opens your view of Roger Avenue. What a mess. A nightmare. Potholes, puddles, ruts, frost heaves, you name it.

No costly traffic-calming devices needed on this residential street. Go any faster than a lunar rover and you'll either scrape bottom or take flight.

Thus is life in Concord and environs.

Routines have been upset. Just getting from here to there can be a game of dodge 'em.

If there are cars parked along one side of a city street, a two-way street suddenly becomes one-way. Turn onto some streets and you'll see a car heading straight at you. Sometimes you have to choose between courtesy and chicken. With courtesy taking a back seat to hustle and bustle these days, you must entertain the possibility that the lady or gentleman behind the other wheel will choose chicken.

And speaking of chicken, for some of us, just getting out of the driveway in the morning is a matter of blind luck. At a right angle, we squeeze into driveways 6 inches wider than our cars. When it's time to back out, we can't see over the banks without opening the door and standing on the doorframe. Since that makes steering a bit dicey, better just to ease out and hope the other guy, if there is one, sees you and stops.

There are some indications that these hassles will soon be forgotten. Daylight Savings Time is here already. Town meeting season has arrived. Mud season would be here, too, if the mud wasn't still lurking beneath the ice. By the calendar, spring begins in 10 days. The Red Sox open at Fenway in less than a month.

Yet all these hopeful signs seem suspicious. The real questions remain whether the shed roof will withstand another storm, when the snow banks along city streets will shrink below car-tops and whether a spring storm will break the snowfall record.

We crave the record, of course. All that shoveling and slipping and sliding, not to mention the oil bills, has already earned us the right to say we survived Concord's snowiest winter on record.

Whether our cars survive is another issue. On that five-minute drive down the few hundred yards of Roger Avenue, we listed to one side then the other, hit bottom in spite of what we swear was the better of bad swerves and heard moans from the suspension system. When at last we saw its length of the avenue in the rearview mirror, we sighed in relief.

But there's a good chance the frost heaves will get worse before, in one of the mysterious miracles of spring, they get better.