Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

I waved back. The other one burst out crying because he hadn’t waved first, so I stopped the loader and waved at him too, special, and he quit.

After that came a retired schoolteacher, and her son had driven out from the Cities the day before the storm and was stuck there with her. He’d been shoveling for an hour and had gotten about six feet in. When he saw me coming, he leaned the shovel against the mailbox and stood out of the way.

Then Merle.

Merle is 88. He lives in a little white house with a big chicken coop out back, and he still keeps forty laying hens because he says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in the morning otherwise. He hadn’t been able to get out to the coop the whole storm without wading.

I cleared his drive, and then I cleared a path from his back step to the coop door, two bucket widths wide, so he could walk it.

When I came around the corner of the house, he was standing in the coop doorway with an egg basket on his arm, grinning like a boy.

“Hold on,” he said. He disappeared inside the coop and came back out with a dozen eggs in a carton, and he climbed up on the loader step, at 88, before I could stop him, and set it on the floor by my boots.

“You wedge that good,” he said. “They’re fresh this morning. Those girls laid right through it.”

“Merle, you get down from there before you fall.”

“I’ve been climbing on loaders since before your dad was born.” He climbed down anyway, careful, one hand on the rail. On the ground he looked up at me and lowered his voice. “Your aunt’s drive. That was a long time coming.”

“I’m doing the whole road, Merle.”

“I know you are,” he said. “That’s why everybody’s going to remember it.”

By Merle’s, the fifth driveway of the morning, the road had changed.

I didn’t notice it right away. I was working. But when I backed out of Merle’s drive, I looked back down the road and saw people.

They were out on the shoulders. All up and down the road, in front of the houses I’d already done, people were standing out in the sun in their boots and coats. The widower with his thermos. The young mother and the twins. The schoolteacher and her son. Merle, by his mailbox, with his hands in his pockets.

They weren’t doing anything. They were just standing out there, watching the old yellow loader work its way up the road in the sunshine.

The sixth place was Sonja’s.

Sonja and her husband run the last dairy on our road, about a hundred and twenty cows, and the milk truck has to get into their yard every other day or they have to dump milk. Their tank holds two days and change. The truck was supposed to come at ten. It was a quarter after nine.

Sonja’s husband was out on his own skid steer, trying to clear the yard, but the drift at the end of their drive was taller than the skid steer was, and he’d been at it since six. When he saw me coming, he backed his machine off to the side and lifted his hand.