Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

I drove out to the farm that afternoon in my truck, crawling, behind the county plow. Dad was in his recliner with his leg up and the weather on.

“Ione called you,” he said before I got my coat off.

“She called me.”

“I’ve been sitting here two days thinking about her.” He shook his head. “I can’t get up on that thing yet. I tried this morning. Got one foot on the step and the knee said no.”

“I know, Dad. I’m going to run it.”

He looked at me over his glasses for a long minute. Then he pointed at the wall by the back door, where the key hangs on a nail with a red tag.

“Plug it in tonight,” he said. “And put a bottle of the anti-gel in the tank. It’s on the shelf over the bench. It’s going to be ten below by morning.”

I went out to the shed in the last of the light. I topped off the tank, poured in the anti-gel, plugged in the block heater, and checked the tires and the hydraulic fluid while I was there. The bucket cylinders were dry, so I greased them.

I slept in my old room. I didn’t sleep much.

The wind quit sometime around four in the morning. I know because I woke up to the quiet, the way you do out there, the whole house suddenly too still.

I was up at six-thirty. Dad was already in the kitchen in his robe, with the coffee made and the radio low. The weather man said ten below at the airport, clear skies, light wind.

“Ione first,” Dad said.

“Ione first.”

I pulled my gray knit cap down over my ponytail and zipped my green work coat up to my chin. Two pairs of gloves. A scarf Dad made me take.

Outside the sky was going pink over the tree line to the east. By the time I’d walked to the shed and shoveled the drift away from the door, the sun was clearing the trees, and it was full daylight. Not a cloud. That hard, bright blue you only get after a blizzard, when the air is so cold it rings.

The loader started on the third try. It coughed white smoke out the stack and shook like a wet dog, and then it settled into that low, steady knock that I’ve loved since I was eleven.

I let it warm ten minutes, worked the bucket to get the oil moving, then backed it out of the shed and onto the yard.

Dad was standing in the kitchen window. He lifted his coffee cup. I lifted my hand off the wheel.

The county plow had been through our road once in the night, so there was a lane down the middle, one blade wide, with a wall on each side. I took the loader down it in road gear, maybe fifteen miles an hour, with the bucket up.

With an open cab at ten below, you feel every one of those fifteen miles an hour. My face went numb in the first half mile. I pulled the scarf up over my nose.

Aunt Ione’s place sits at the end of the road where it tees into the county blacktop, the last house before the turn. Her red farmhouse came up out of the white with the sun on the side of it, smoke going straight up from the chimney.