By Seth Boyes,
As this column is being written, it looks like we might still get a white Christmas with a few days to spare — Iowa weather can be fickle though, so forgive me if I’m wrong.
I’ll admit I, like many other Iowans, have a love-hate relationship with snow. It’s impossible to say how many times I’ve heard the bit about how we’d prefer to have snow for a few weeks at the end of the year and then never again until the next Christmas comes around.
And I get it.
Snow is beautiful — it just is — but it also means work, and sometimes it means slippery roads or delayed trips to see family.
And, as the son of a public school teacher, it sometimes calls to mind the sound of a landline phone ringing. I would relish the bleating of our phone if it came in the early hours of a weekday morning. There was only one reason for someone to ring our house at that hour — it meant the superintendent had called for a two-hour delay at the least. This was before cell phones were widely used, so my dad and other school employees set up a calling tree to spread the news whenever needed. And if I heard that phone ring a second time before those two hours were up — oh, the joy of knowing with certainty that school was cancelled.
Of course, as I got older, that didn’t mean I didn’t have things to do. By the time I was finishing up junior high, my dad and I were doing basic lawn care and snow removal for about five houses around the neighborhood in addition to our own. So, eventually there came the possibility that the same early morning phone call would essentially serve as a wake up call for us to clear some driveways and sidewalks.
I recall one particular morning when I thought dad was being overzealous when he woke me up to help clear things off early. It must not have been a big enough snow to call off school, because I remember walking home that afternoon (yes, I actually walked to school from fourth-grade until my graduation) and noticing other folks in our neighborhood straining to scrape their way through layers of crusty snow and ice that had built up on the concrete of their driveways. But as I neared home, I could see our driveway was clear — we’d done our work early, and the afternoon sun had taken care of the rest while we were away.
It seems like such a small thing now, but it made a big enough impression on me back then that, when dad came home for dinner, I actually had to tell him how right he was about getting up early that morning.
And, I’d venture to say that was a pretty significant thing to hear from a young and often self-assured teen.
Believe it or not, I still think about that day pretty often when I go out to shovel my own driveway (which judging by the fluff falling outside the office window while I type this, I’ll be doing again in fairly short order). Frankly, that memory has probably led me to care a little too much about how well I clear my own driveway and sidewalks. But it’s not the only meaningful snow-removal memory that strolls into the forefront of my mind when I feel my shovel scuff against the rough concrete and thump to a stop against the grass at its edge.
I learned about perseverance while sliding on a slippery driveway. I learned about helping others while facing deep drifts. I learned to take pride in hard work while stomping the snow off my boots on the back porch.
Those are the kind of memories that help (at least a little) when the snow is especially deep, or it’s especially early for my back to be slinging snow.
And, where once I could just about rely on instinct to lift my shovel over every heave and skip across every seem in the sidewalks on my block, this winter I find myself adjusting the pitch of my shovel to meet some new and unfamiliar inclines — it’s not unlike life in general, I suppose.
And, like other things in life, familiarity will come with time. In many ways, I’m excited to meet the rises and falls of life’s paths during the coming months and years — though I’m still not entirely thrilled about the prospect of rising early to do so.
Like I said, there’s a bit of a love-hate relationship there.
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