Thursday, February 13, 2014

Diary of a Snow Shoveler

For many years at the Highlands-Cashiers Players Christmas Reading, local actor Stuart Armor has read a hilarious piece called "Diary of a Snow Shoveler."  I suppose I must sound like that naive, hapless snow-shoveler at the beginning of a long season of relentless snow, but I really do love clearing walks and driveways with that little aluminum blade, exposing sidewalk and driveway with clean, geometric precision.



Snow-shoveling reminds me of growing up in Connecticut, where we sometimes had epic snows.  Here's a photo my Dad took sometime in the mid-1960s on the 35mm camera he had just gotten for Christmas - our little Cape Cod house on Anthony Road:



My brother and I, entrepreneurs that we were, would head out the morning after a heavy snow (but only AFTER we had shoveled our own driveway!) with nothing but snow shovels in our hands, and would go door-to-door down the block.  "Want your driveway shoveled?"  we would ask.  There was little competition from home snow-blowers at the time (which were new-fangled in the 60s) and we could name our price - anywhere between $2.00 and $5.00 depending on the length of the driveway, which seemed like an enormous sum to us at the time.

So today I remembered shoveling snow with my older brother, who is long gone except in my memory.  He would have appreciated the sleet we had here last night, which turned 3 or 4 inches of snow into an inch of condensed, heavy ice.

Now I'm waiting for the D.O.T.'s snowplow driver to erect that long, high ridge of ice at the foot of the driveway.  Where was he?  When I was a boy he used to show up at the precise moment we went inside the house and took off our wet gloves.


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