Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

I looked down the road. From the end of Aunt Ione’s drive you can see almost the whole length of it, a mile and a half back to the bend, with the houses strung along both sides. Every one of them had a wall of snow at the end of the driveway where the county plow had gone by.

Every one of them had somebody behind that wall who needed to get somewhere today.

And right next to Aunt Ione’s drive, Hollis’s lane was still drifted shut, smooth and untouched, the snow halfway up his yard light. His house was dark. He’d have worked the night shift at the mill, if the mill had run, and come home in it, and gone to bed.

I’d thought about this most of the night, lying awake in my old room.

If I only cleared Aunt Ione’s drive, it was a feud. Everybody on the road would see the Lindqvist girl run the loader down to her aunt’s and back, right past Hollis’s lane, and they’d know why. And Hollis would know why. And next storm he’d push it right back where it was, out of pride.

But if I cleared the whole road, it was just a Wednesday. It was what neighbors do after a blizzard.

“I’m going to do the road,” I said.

Aunt Ione looked at me a long time. Then she looked over at Hollis’s dark house, and back at me.

“All of it?”

“All eleven.”

“His too?”

“His last,” I said.

She thought about that. Then she nodded, slowly, and something came into her face that I couldn’t read right then. “Your grandfather would have done exactly that,” she said. “Go on, then. I’ll have the coffee on.”

The first house back up the road from Aunt Ione’s belongs to a widower who lives at the curve. He’s in his late seventies and drove gravel truck for the county for thirty years. His wife passed two springs ago.

He was standing in his front window when I pulled in. By the time I’d taken the first bite out of his snowbank, he was out on his step in his barn coat, waving both arms.

I cleared his drive to the garage and made a turnaround by the woodpile, because I know he backs in. When I came back out, he’d walked down to the road. He held up one finger, went back inside, and came out with a thermos and a coffee cup with a lid.

“You’re Arvid’s girl,” he said, handing it up.

“Jessa.”

“You run that like your dad.” He looked down the road. “You doing the whole thing?”

“That’s the plan.”

He nodded at Hollis’s dark lane, way down at the end. He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t have to. Everybody on that road had seen the ridge on Aunt Ione’s drive all winter.

“Well,” he said, “you’d better get after it, then.”

Next up the road is a young couple with twin boys, maybe six years old. The husband drives truck over the road and was gone, stuck somewhere in North Dakota behind the same storm. His wife came out with the boys on either side of her in snowsuits, so bundled their arms stuck straight out.

They had a minivan in the garage and no way to get it out. She had a shift at the nursing home at two.

I cleared her drive and the apron in front of the garage. The boys stood in the yard the whole time, not moving, their mouths open, watching the bucket go up and down. When I backed out to the road, one of them raised his mitten and waved at me, very serious, like a man waving to a man.