Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

The first time I saw it happen, I was standing in my Aunt Ione’s kitchen with a cup of her coffee going cold in my hand, and I watched Hollis Brandvold bury her.

It was the second week of December, a little after nine in the morning. The storm had dropped about fourteen inches overnight and quit at dawn, and the sun was out on all that white like nothing had happened.

Hollis was out on his tractor with the big blade on the front, doing his lane the way he always did it. Down toward the road, a hard turn, and every scoop pushed off to the right.

To the right was the end of Aunt Ione’s driveway.

I watched him make six passes. Each one rolled a little more snow up onto that pile until it stood higher than her mailbox, packed and gray where the blade had polished it.

“He does that every time,” Aunt Ione said behind me. She said it the way you’d say the furnace kicks on at six. Just a fact of the house.

She was 83 that winter. She had never married, and she lived alone in the house at the end of our road, the same house she was born in, with a woodstove she still fed herself and a cat named for nobody.

I was 38, the school bus mechanic for our district, and I lived four miles off in town. I’d come out that morning because the buses were canceled and I had a free day for once.

“Every time?” I said.

“Since Arvid’s knee,” she said. Arvid is my dad, her little brother. “Before that, your father had it gone before I was up. I never had to think about it.”

I set the coffee down and went out to the shop for her scoop shovel.

It took me two hours and ten minutes to cut through that ridge by hand. The bottom foot of it had set up like concrete in the cold, and I had to chop it with the edge of the shovel before I could lift anything.

Aunt Ione stood at the window the whole time. Every so often she knocked on the glass and held up a mug, and every time I shook my head and kept going.

When I was through, I walked over to Hollis’s place. He was in his shop with the door half up, greasing the tractor, and the radio was going.

Hollis was 58, a big, quiet man who worked nights at the feed mill in town. He had lived on that lane his whole life, first with his folks and then alone after they passed. I’d known him since I was a girl.

“Hollis,” I said, “the snow off your lane is going across the end of Aunt Ione’s drive. She’s been stuck since last night.”

He didn’t stop with the grease gun. “Snow’s got to go somewhere, Jessa.”

“It could go left,” I said. “Into your field.”

“Field’s got a ditch on that side. I’d drop a wheel in it.” He looked at me then. “That’s how Dad always did it. Forty years.”

I said I understood that, and I asked him if he’d please think about it. He said he’d think about it. I went home.

The next storm came four days before Christmas. Nine inches, and wind behind it. Hollis plowed his lane the same way, and Aunt Ione was stuck again.

This time I went over before I shoveled. I asked him nicer than the first time, if that was possible, and I told him she was 83 and couldn’t get her mail.