Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

On the way home, Aunt Ione held the package in her lap with both hands, like you’d hold a baby bird. She didn’t say much.

When we pulled into her drive, the rural carrier had been by, and there was mail in her box, the first in nine days.

She wouldn’t let me get it for her. She got out of the truck and walked down to the end of the drive by herself, in her father’s old felt-lined boots that she’s worn every winter since 1970, the ones three sizes too big that she stuffs with newspaper at the toes.

I watched her from the cab. She walked slowly, carefully, on the packed gravel where the berm had been. She opened the mailbox and took out the stack and stood there in the sun going through it, one envelope at a time. The light bill. A seed catalog. A Christmas card that had been held up somewhere since December.

And a card from the twins down the road. Their mother must have walked it up while we were in town. Two crayon drawings of a yellow loader, one with a lady in it, one with a lady and a very large sun.

Aunt Ione stood there at her mailbox and looked at those two drawings for a long time.

Then she bowed her head, right there by the road, just for a second. I saw her lips move. I knew what she was saying, because I’ve heard her say it over every meal of my life. Thank you, Lord, for this day and what it brought.

She came back up the drive with the mail pressed against her coat and tears running down both cheeks, and she was smiling.

“Look at this,” she said, holding up the drawings. “That one’s me. I’m the sun.”

The next storm came the second week of February. Seven inches, overnight, and clear by morning.

I happened to be at Aunt Ione’s that day. I’d come out early because I had a feeling.

At about half past eight we heard Hollis’s tractor start up. Aunt Ione and I went to her kitchen window, and when I looked up the road, I saw other people doing the same thing. The widower at the curve, in his window. Merle, out by his mailbox, with his hands in his pockets, just standing there.

The whole road watched where Hollis’s blade went.

He came down his lane slow. At the bottom, where he’d always made his hard turn to the right, he stopped. He sat there on the tractor for a moment. Then he angled the blade the other way and pushed every scoop left, across the road, into the open field.

When his own lane was done, he didn’t put the tractor away.

He drove it out onto the road, turned in at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive, and plowed it. All the way to her door. Then he cleaned out around her mailbox post, careful, the way I had, so the carrier could pull right up.

Then he drove home.

Aunt Ione stood at the window with her coffee and didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “Well,” and went to get a second cup down from the cupboard, because she knew he’d be by.

He was. He sat at her kitchen table for an hour, and they talked about his mother’s rhubarb.

It snowed four more times that February. Hollis plowed Aunt Ione’s drive himself every single time, usually before she was even up, and he never once mentioned it.