A Winter's Struggle
For months, our neighbor, Hollis Brandvold, had been plowing his snow into my eighty-three-year-old Aunt Ione’s driveway, blocking her mailbox and keeping her heart pills from being delivered. The snow formed a four-foot ridge, frozen solid by morning. I spoke to him twice, trying to be polite, but he always had the same answer: “Jessa, the snow needs somewhere to go.” His father had pushed it that direction for forty years before he died.
I could have reported the situation to the town, but arguing wouldn’t help Aunt Ione get her heart medication. Her prescriptions arrived by mail, and the mail carrier couldn’t stop if her box was blocked. Then the January blizzard hit. Two days of wind and twenty-two inches of snowfall. Tuesday morning, my aunt called, her voice trembling. “The post office is holding my medicine. I’ve only got enough through Thursday.”
“When was your last delivery?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
She counted the days. “Nine days ago.”
I repair school buses for a living. My father, who’s seventy, had recently gotten a new knee. His old yellow loader was sitting unused because he couldn’t climb into it. “Key’s on the nail,” he said. “Plug it in overnight.”
I went outside at dawn. The thermometer read ten below zero. Not a cloud interrupted the blue sky. I tucked my ponytail into my gray knit cap and zipped my green work jacket. On the third try, the loader engine caught. It had an open cab, and at that temperature, the cold went straight through me.
I drove to Aunt Ione’s first. She stood beside her mailbox with a shovel, her white hair visible above her long navy coat. She was eighty-three, trying to chip through a snowbank higher than her head. “I was going to handle it,” she said, her voice a mix of determination and exhaustion.
I broke through the frozen ridge in four passes. She rested a glove on top of her mailbox and stood quietly. “I haven’t been able to reach this for nine days.” I turned and looked along our road. Eleven houses were trapped behind snow. If I cleared only her driveway, it might start an argument. But if I helped everybody, there’d be no reason to make it personal.
I continued working, my breath forming clouds in the frigid air. I opened the entrance for a widower near the curve, cleared a young mother’s driveway so she could get her twin boys settled before her two o’clock shift, and made a path for eighty-eight-year-old Merle to reach his chickens. At Sonja’s dairy, the milk truck was expected at ten. I cleared that lane too.
People appeared in boots and heavy coats, some offering words of gratitude, others simply watching. Someone handed me hot coffee, and Merle stepped onto the loader, offering me a dozen eggs. At the ninth house, neighbors were waving from their porches. I couldn’t wave back much; I needed both hands for the machine, and my throat was tight.
At twenty past eleven, ten driveways were finished. One remained. Hollis worked overnight, so his quarter-mile lane was still completely drifted shut. I cleared his too, every scoop going left, into the field. Then I scraped the last of his old snowbank away from Aunt Ione’s driveway, keeping going until the gravel appeared. The loader stopped running at 11:52. Silence settled over the whole road.
Then Hollis’s front door opened. He looked at his clean lane, then noticed the bare gravel where his snow ridge had been. Finally, he looked toward the other houses. Neighbors stood outside beneath the winter sun, all facing him. Nobody spoke. Aunt Ione leaned on her shovel next to me. Hollis came down the steps and approached slowly, his hands hanging beside him. His eyes met mine, and for a moment, the tension felt like it could snap.
What would he say?
