Wet and Slushy

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or write today, until I say my daughter-in-law’s response to a post of my morning of shoveling snow. She said that my son, Andrew, told her he enjoyed shoveling the snow, after doing their drive and the neighbor’s. I almost always enjoyed the solitude of removing the snow from our driveway and walks as long as the cold wasn’t bitter and the wind wasn’t lazy. A lazy wind is a wind that goes through you instead of around you.

Many late evenings, I would go outside and remove the snow. When it was later, there was only a little traffic. The snow was drifting down with a soft, hissing sound. The flakes made a constantly shifting curtain that gave me a feeling of solitude and peace. It is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Slow and easy when I could, shovelful after another, scooped, lifted, and tossed to the side, it produces and almost euphoric state. I think that runners and athletes go into this feeling or I can’t imagine that they would punish their bodies otherwise.

When my family had to get out in the morning, I didn’t want the job to be any harder to open the drive for them to leave, so I would shovel in the evening and then get up again while they were dressing and eating to be sure they could get out of the drive. I couldn’t do anything about the road way, they were in God’s hands after they left the house.

Sometimes the snow would drift and with the limited time to open the drive, I would clean out the width of a  shovel around the car and then that wide and maybe a bit wider I would clean the path the car would have to be driven to the highway.

I would come back inside, cold, tired, and sleepy as they family finished dressing and piled into the car and wait until they would leave. I waited until they were out of the drive, because...there were times I would have to go back outside.

I would get so frustrated. when my wife, Cindy, would somehow manage to drive the car into the deep snow on one side of the car or the other and I would have to go back outside to dig the snow out from under and around the car, so they could get to school. I still can’t understand how she passed her driver’s exam and couldn’t drive straight ahead.

Later in the day, I would finish cleaning the drive. It was often a constant battle with the drifting snow and a back and forth duel with the snow plow trucks, but that is another story.