Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

Dad’s truck was parked in Aunt Ione’s drive now. I could see the two of them in her kitchen window, side by side, the way they must have stood at that same window sixty years ago as children, watching their own father come in from the barn.

I dropped the bucket and started on Hollis’s lane.

It was the biggest job of the morning. A quarter mile of blizzard, two feet on the level and drifted deep across the yard. I took my time with it. I cut it wide, wider than he’d have cut it himself, and squared off the sides so the next snow would have somewhere to go.

And I pushed every bucket of it left. Onto the open field, well clear of the ditch, where it landed on nothing and buried nobody.

I cleared his yard. I cleared the apron in front of his shop. I cleared a path to his front step and another to his propane tank, so the gas truck could get in, because I know when a tank is low in January and his gauge was reading twenty percent.

Then I came back out to the road and did one more thing.

At the end of Aunt Ione’s drive, along the edge where her drive met his lane, there was still a little of the old ridge left. A frozen lip of it, a foot or so high, the very bottom of his December snow. I’d left it when I cleared her drive at sunup because I’d been in a hurry to get her open.

I took that out too. I scraped it down to the gravel and carried it across the road and dumped it in the field with the rest.

When I was done, there was nothing left of that berm. Not one shovelful. You couldn’t have told it was ever there.

I backed the loader out into the middle of the road, set the brake, and shut it down.

I looked at my watch. Eleven fifty-two.

The quiet after a diesel shuts off is the loudest thing in the world. My ears rang with it. I sat there in the open cab in the sun, with my hands in my lap and the eggs and the cookies and the cold coffee at my feet, and I let it ring.

Up and down the road, people were still out on the shoulders.

Aunt Ione’s door opened and she came out, in the navy coat again, with Dad behind her on his cane. She walked down her clear driveway to the end of it. She still had the shovel. I don’t know why. I think she just liked holding it.

She stood beside the loader and put her hand on the step.

And that’s when Hollis’s front door opened.

He came out onto his step in a sweatshirt and his chore boots, unlaced, squinting, a man who’d been sound asleep ten minutes before. The silence must have woken him. Or maybe the noise had, hours ago, and he’d lain there listening to it.

He looked at his lane first.

A quarter mile of it, open and square, cleaner than he’d ever cut it himself. His yard. His shop apron. The path to his propane tank.

Then he looked at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive. At the place where his ridge had been since December. At the bare gravel there now.

Then he looked down the road.

Eleven open driveways. Every neighbor he had, standing out in the sunshine on the shoulders, looking back at him. The widower with his thermos. Merle with his hands in his pockets. Sonja, who’d walked all the way down from the dairy. The twins, who for once were standing still.