Editor’s note: Trudging up my driveway this past week after dark, I was reminded of this column from awhile back, published the week of Feb. 9, 2014, seven years ago. Judging from the number of cars I’ve seen parked at the bottoms of hills over the past couple weeks, I’m sure a lot of you can still relate to these stories.

All right, winter. I’m saying “uncle.” You win. Now get out of here.

It’s been really impressive the way you’ve thrown school off schedule for not one, not six, but 11 days. It’s great. I love having to bear the bad news to my hopeful 6-year-old every morning now that yes, you are going to school today.

But by far my favorite move of yours is what you’ve done with my driveway.

In the best of weather, it’s a serene, scenic buffer between us and the busy highway below.

Lately, it could qualify as an Olympic sport: Part luge run, part downhill ski, part curling up in pain and shame and out of breath halfway up, as I am reminded how out of shape I am.

After an expensive meeting between my PT Cruiser and a cedar tree five or six winters ago, I no longer trust any amount of snow to be safe on that hill. Not even now that I drive a Subaru.

Like many of you with hilltop homes, I park at the bottom and walk up. As much as I’ve appreciated being rescued by Ray and his wrecker, I’d rather not be a sheriff’s log entry.

“You get a little bit of exercise,” is how Maggie Mills puts it, about walking up the gravel, S-curved private Jacobs Lane to the top of the hill. Her little red four-door has been parked at the base of Winter View neighborhood for a couple of days.

Her hike is about a quarter-mile. She prefers that option to her son’s method: Put it in first gear and “absolutely do not touch the brakes,” trying to stay out of the inside of the curve.

“You can admire the trees and the wildlife,” she said. “And the neighborhood has a rooster, so you can hear it crowing.” Sometimes, her neighbors see her walking and pick her up in their four-wheel-drives.

But lovely as it can be, the walk can be kind of a pain for neighbors who heat with wood. They end up hiking it up two sticks at a time when the firewood delivery truck can’t make it up. Last time he tried, he slid off the road, Mills said.

Likewise, “if I have to get groceries, I plan very carefully, because I’m going to be carrying them,” she said.

Before Dick Routh and his neighbors got together to pave their road, and then pay Designscape to salt and sand it, they sledded their groceries up the hill. He’s up in the Tree Tops neighborhood, that steep climb off the south end of Clay Lick.

“But we were a lot younger then,” he said. “It can take your breath away.”

We used the sled method just once, with more precious cargo: Our older son, who was about 3 at the time. He thought it was awesome. Mom and Dad, not so much. All I could picture was the sled sliding out of our hands and into a tree, like my car.

Like Mills said about driving down her road, “It’s enough to age you about two years.”

Jim Ray has put his snowblower to the test more times than he’d like to count this winter. He lives off Greasy Creek, on one of those driveways with a 200-foot climb at about a 13 percent grade. Picture a perfect triangle and draw a line from a bottom corner through the middle to one of the sides. That’s how steep that pitch is.

“I have to constantly work on it,” he said. “But a lot of people have it a lot worse than we do.”

Thanks to his 4×4 Ford and his snowblower — and the many chutes he’s ruined by picking up gravel with the snow — he hasn’t had to hike it.

“I can tell you who really has a big problem, and it’s my neighbor down the next level,” he says. “They had to have a wrecker come in.”

It’s true, Dave Bartlett admits. He had to get towed off his own driveway. “It was late at night, and I’m gotta tell you, I’m afraid I did say a few bad words. I was quite upset that I had to get pulled out of my own driveway. But I was just desperate at that point.”

This season, driving up has become “a matter of principle.” Versus Old Man Winter, this man will win.

Sans plow or snowblower, Bartlett’s weapon of choice is sand. He carries tubes of it with him and a coffee can for sprinkling. If it works for the highway department, it can work for your driveway — and under your feet, if your car is already in a ditch.

He’s also tried putting down gravel and tarping the curve halfway up on the drive before a snowstorm, with some success.

I’ll have to suggest that to my husband/snowplow driver, who’s gone through 60 bags of ice melt this year.

Yes, that’s a lot, but it beats carrying a computer, purse, work bag, diaper bag and bundled-up-squirming-baby-who-won’t-keep-his-mittens-on up a treacherous stretch of asphalt, in the near-dark — while that warm beacon of home seems never to get any closer.

Spring, please save us. This fight has gone on long enough.

P.S. That “bundled up squirming baby” is now 8, and the “hopeful 6-year-old” is nearly 14. Where does the time go?