Snow you can walk on. Everybody can walk on snow.
What takes a man down is the cycle every northern winter runs on repeat — it snows, it warms up, it rains, it refreezes hard overnight. By morning your walkway is a sheet of glass with three inches of powder sitting on top of it like a rug over a trap door.
You put your foot down. It looks like snow. It isn't.
And here's the part that separates 40 from 65: at 40 you go down, you swear, you get up. Past 60, you go down and you lie there for a second doing arithmetic. Can I move. Can I get up. Is anybody home.
One fall on ice averages a $30,000+ hospital bill and six weeks off your feet. Hip, wrist, tailbone, ribs, head. That's the real price of walking out to the mailbox on a bad morning.
A pair of these costs less than your co-pay.