They are virtually indestructible. Run them over with a car or lawn mower, suction them through the vacuum, subject them to the elements for months at a time — it doesn’t matter. They are impervious to pain.

Yet anyone who has ever stepped on one barefoot knows the excruciating pain they can inflict. The unexpected, piercing jolt that can only be caused by something so hard, so angular, so perfectly engineered to both last forever and to cause maximum collateral damage.

Lego guys.

Lesser toys crumble under the chaotic pressure of our family battlefield — the stuffed animals wither, the electronics succumb to slobber, and the cheap plastics snap the week after Christmas. But the Lego guys — the Special Forces of the toy bin — endure.

And like the Rangers and SEALs they prefer to operate under the cover of night. That’s when I always seem to come across them anyway: at 2 a.m., suddenly imbedded deep in the sole of my foot. Ambushed as I groggily fill an order for a late night sippy cup.

As I was taking out the garbage the other day, I came across a rugged platoon of Lego guys unexpectedly poking out from the melting snowpack still stubbornly clinging to the driveway. They had apparently spilled from little hands headlong into the deep, icy crevasse of a Michigan winter, and as I dug into the snow to rescue them, I discovered additional items that had apparently spilled out of those same little hands: a December electric bill and credit card solicitation. And there, huddled beneath the soggy envelopes, seeking shelter from the elements, I found still more Lego survivors.

Remarkably, despite spending an entire winter entombed in a blanket of snow and ice, provisioned without so much as a winter hat, in the middle of a heavily-trafficked driveway, the Lego guys beamed up at me with still-unbroken smiles. As I cradled them in my hand, marveling at their resilience, I suddenly felt remarkably small. Had I shoveled the driveway just once this winter, I might have found them sooner and saved them all the hardship.

But, despite record snowfall this winter, I hadn’t. Though I genuinely enjoy the snow, I have always been a mostly reluctant shoveler. The roots of my indifference trace to when I was a boy. My older brother Dave, an avid skier and outdoorsman, would repeatedly criticize my technique. By throwing the snow around so haphazardly, he said, I was guilty of “killing snow.”

“Like this,” he would demonstrate, carefully stacking the snow into a central, grocery-store-parking-lot-sized pile that would last well into spring. With Dave policing the driveway, our snow blower was sentenced to solitary, gradually rusting away its existence alone in a dark corner of the garage.

The bag of rock salt fared worse. It was simply done away with, executed for its repeated, brutal crimes against snowflakes. With so many billions of lives at stake I withdrew from the process completely.

Now, as a father, I am always looking for little efficiencies that enable me to focus on the important things like taking the kids to ballgames or managing our Netflix queue, and this year I decided cutting out snow removal would become one of those efficiencies. The kids would eventually eat much of it anyway, I figured, and all the pedestrian and vehicular traffic would pack down what remained into a smooth — dare I say picturesque — glacial formation.

I realize there are neighbors and friends, including the UPS guy, that look disapprovingly on what they consider to be pure neglect on my part. All winter they insisted I borrow their snowblowers and salt to clear the snow. I wanted to accept but remembered my brother and politely declined.

Besides, my hands-off approach has opened our lives to the possibility of small, but very real, unintentional miracles.

For example, while unloading an armful of IKEA purchases, I accidentally dropped and then slipped over a partially eaten bag of potato chips, first spilling and then crushing the chips onto a patch of winter about the size of a large pizza. To my surprise, the salty chips not only melted the ice, but the thousands of pulverized chip fragments provided astonishingly gritty traction in that particular spot over an astonishingly long period of time. For weeks it became a sort of outpost, a rest stop, for weary grocery unloaders until more snows came and the effect of the IKEA chips eventually wore off.

But this time of year in Michigan the reemergence of the sun feels like the biggest miracle. And, after vacationing elsewhere all winter, it has finally, mercifully started working on my driveway.

Over the coming weeks the snow and ice will continue to melt, the considerable runoff will gather into small glacial streams and flow toward the Huron, and more long-buried Lego guys and months-old mail will emerge.

Before long spring will arrive, tulips and grass will sprout, and parking spots around campus will gradually reappear. By June summer will finally be here again and the Lego guys I just returned to the kids will spill back out of their little hands and into the deep, dark void of my should-have-been-cut-weeks-ago lawn.

And, inevitably, I’ll awake from my sleep to realize I’ve forgotten to take out the trash. At 2 a.m. I’ll stagger, groggy and barefoot, out the front door, taking the shortcut across the lawn as I wheel the recycling cart to the curb.

And there, under the cover of night, when I least expect it, I’ll feel that sudden, familiar jolt of pain deep in the sole of my foot.

Paul Fredenberg lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and seven children. He can be reached at psfredenberg@gmail.com.