Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

“Arvid always took care of that,” he said.

“Dad had his knee replaced at Thanksgiving,” I said. “He can’t climb up on the loader yet.”

Hollis rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He didn’t do anything. I don’t think he was being mean, exactly. I think he’d pushed snow to the right his whole life because his father had, and somebody else had always cleaned up the end of it, and so in his mind it had never landed anywhere.

But it landed on an old woman’s driveway, and that old woman was my aunt.

Dad wanted to call the town. The town chairman had told him once, years ago, that driveways were not the town’s business, only the road. The deputy would have come out, maybe, and maybe written Hollis a letter about the ordinance, sometime in March.

I’d already asked twice. And I knew how a road works out here. There are eleven houses on ours. A feud started over snow can last forty years, and it would be Aunt Ione living next to it, not me.

What Aunt Ione needed was her mailbox open and her pills in her hand. Not a fight.

Her pills came by mail, ninety days at a time, from the pharmacy her insurance used. A blood thinner and two for her heart. The rural carrier will not stop at a box he cannot reach, and nobody could reach hers.

Then came the January blizzard.

It started on a Sunday afternoon and blew for two days straight. By the time it was done we had twenty-two inches on the level and drifts to the fence tops on the north side of every road in Polk County.

Hollis had plowed once on the Saturday before it, ahead of the snow, a small storm of five or six inches. That ridge was already on Aunt Ione’s drive when the blizzard came and buried it.

She called me Tuesday at noon, while the wind was still going.

“Jessa,” she said, “I don’t want to be a bother.”

“You’re not a bother.”

“The post office called. They’re holding a package for me. It’s my pills.” She paused. “I have through Thursday.”

I looked out my kitchen window at the snow going sideways past the streetlight. “How long since you’ve had mail?”

She counted. I could hear her counting. “Nine days, by tomorrow.”

Nine days. An 83-year-old woman at the end of a country road, with a phone and a woodstove and a cat, and nothing coming in or going out for nine days because of a pile of snow that was not hers.

“I’ll be there in the morning,” I said. “First light.”

“Don’t you get stuck on my account.”

“I won’t get stuck,” I said. “I’m bringing the loader.”

There was a little quiet on the line. Then she laughed, the short laugh she has, like a door opening. “Does your father know that?”

“He will in about five minutes.”

Dad’s place is the home farm, two miles past Aunt Ione’s on the same road. He doesn’t milk anymore. He sold the cows in 2009 and rents the cropland to a young man who farms with his father-in-law. But he kept the machine shed, and he kept the loader.

It’s an old yellow wheel loader, older than I am, with an open cab and a canopy over the seat and a bucket a little wider than a pickup. Dad bought it used at a township auction when I was in grade school. I learned to drive it when I was eleven, pushing manure in the barnyard with him standing on the step beside me.