It snowed a foot-plus in maybe ten hours Saturday. The temperature was warmer, from the high twenties to high thirties, yielding a heavier, wetter, upslope snow. Though we’re on a quarter-mile long dirt road in the mountains, we get plowed right away. But the porch, walkways, gravel driveway, and cars need to be cleared. Eight inches of feathery powder is one thing, fourteen inches of heavy, wet, cement quite another.
Since it was sunny and warming, I went out in a sweatshirt and shorts, shades, no socks, my walking stick in my right hand so as not to tumble and fall like an old man, a large volume grain scoop as snow shovel in my left hand and cleared the porch and most of the wooden walkway ramp over to the cars. I reminded myself to pace, recalling the often-quoted cardiac statistics among the Colorado elderly this time of year, and bowed to approaching the rest of the job in stages. Yes, that’s it! It will be my five-stage strategy!
I came in, had coffee, ate an orange, and read Alice Walker poems.
My unfinished task, my unrealized strategy, wormed its way through my Guilt Cortex for a couple hours, stifling my day off relaxation.
Then, an odd sound came in from outside, a scraping of a sort, with voices and laughter. What the hell? Houses here are far enough apart—it’s rare we hear anyone.
“Let me go look. I should finish shoveling anyway or it’ll never get done. If it’s my time, so be it.”
I looked out the kitchen window and the young folks who rent the house across the road had shoveled themselves out and one guy shoveled us too! I walked out and chatted him up, thanking him profusely, gobsmacked at his kindness, feeling for how to accept such a charity, embodying my mortality, in awe of the kindness of strangers. And then puzzling through thank you gift ideas. This being Boulder, I needed to consider. “Not alcohol, I don’t think they drink. Gluten free? Sugar? Vegan? Weed?”
My generous neighbors gave me a lesson in freeing my obsessive doer and allowing the receiver to get some exercise. This is how it’s going to be.
I may settle on a ficus.
February 4, 2024
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