Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

And she was out by the mailbox.

I hadn’t expected that. She was standing in the snow at the end of her drive in her long navy wool coat, her white hair bare to the cold, holding the scoop shovel I’d left leaning by her door.

She had waded out through the yard to get there. I could see her tracks from the house, a long trench of them, each one up past her knees.

She was chipping at the ridge.

It stood between her and the road like a wall. Hollis’s December snow and his Saturday snow, and the blizzard on top of that, all packed and drifted together into one long ridge more than four feet high and fifteen feet long. Her mailbox stuck up out of the middle of it.

Eighty-three years old, with a scoop shovel, against that.

I stopped the loader in the road and climbed down. “Aunt Ione, what are you doing out here?”

“I was going to get it myself,” she said. Her cheeks were red and her eyes were wet from the cold. She was smiling. “I didn’t think you’d really come.”

“I told you I’d come.”

“People tell me a lot of things.” She leaned on the shovel. “Well, go on. I want to see you run it.”

I climbed back up and dropped the bucket.

The first bite didn’t go in. The face of the ridge had frozen into a shell, and the bucket skidded up it. I backed off, tipped the bucket edge down, and came at it again lower, at the base, where the old December snow was.

That time it cracked. I felt it go through the seat. A slab the size of a kitchen table broke loose and tipped into the bucket.

I backed up, swung around, and carried it across the road to the open field on the far side, where there was nothing but a fence line and a hundred acres of white. I dumped it there.

Four bites. That was all it took. Two hours and ten minutes with a shovel in December, and four bites with Dad’s loader in January.

Then I squared off the end of her drive, cleaned out around the mailbox post so the carrier could pull right up, and ran the bucket up her driveway to the house and back, twice, until there was a lane wide enough for a pickup.

When I came back down to the road, Aunt Ione was standing right where I’d left her, by the mailbox, with the shovel. She hadn’t moved an inch.

I shut the loader down to an idle and climbed off.

“There,” I said.

She didn’t say anything at first. She reached out and put her glove on the top of her mailbox and just kept it there, the way you’d rest your hand on a horse’s neck.

“I’ve been looking at this mailbox out the window for nine days,” she said. “Nine days. I can see it from my chair.”

“I know.”

“I’m not a person who minds being alone, Jessa. I’ve been alone a long time and I like it fine.” She patted the box. “But I didn’t like that.”

I hugged her. She smelled like woodsmoke and the lilac powder she’s used since I was a baby. She’s a small woman, smaller every year, and I could feel her shoulder bones through the coat.

“Go get warm,” I said. “I’ll come in for coffee in a bit.”

“Where are you going?”