When Hell Freezes Over
I am ever so fortunate to live in a part of the country where it begins to snow right around Thanksgiving time. So if you’re wise enough to stay in bed on Black Friday instead of getting trampled to death at Target while making a mad dash for the DVD players, Mother Nature will send you the friendly reminder that the holiday season has begun by dumping an assload of wet white powder on your doorstep.
Sure, there was that time when I was young and I loved the snow. Those were the days when nothing brought me more joy than nailing my sister in the face with a ball of packed ice. But those childhood memories of crashing our sled into the side of the house fizzled out far too soon. Not long after we discovered we could use the shovels to bury each other alive, they were confiscated for the greater good of clearing the driveway. And since we were so eager to brandish them in the backyard, we were the ones pushing those shovels through the Great Wall left by the snow plow.
Shoveling the driveway and stairs was a chore indeed, and often took most of the morning. So you can imagine with what glee I responded to my mother when one day she met me at the door to request, “Go shovel out the elderly woman across the street.” I attempted to protest that the woman didn’t need her driveway shoveled as I had yet to see a car ever appear in it, but my mother would hear none of it. She was always awfully generous with her child labor.
Bitter and defeated, I trudged across the road, dragging my shovel behind me. With a heavy sigh, I began to clear the neighbor’s driveway. When I was halfway done, the old woman appeared at her door.
“Who are you?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”
I smiled my best ‘I love puppies and Jesus and old people’ smile. “I’m Stacey. From across the street. I’m shoveling you out.”
“I didn’t ask you to shovel my driveway!” she complained.
“My mother sent me,” I responded as jovially as I could manage through gritted teeth. Believe me, lady, this wasn’t my idea.
The woman went back into the house and I returned to my work, more disgruntled than ever.
I finished the driveway and slowly made a path up the walkway. When I was nearly to her porch, the elderly woman appeared at the door again.
“Who are you?” she hissed.
“Stacey,” I repeated, thoroughly irritated by this point. “I live across the street.”
“And what do you think you’re doing?”
That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be polite. I was doing this woman a favor. I could have let her try to shovel her own sidewalk and slip and fall and break a hip. I could have left her in the snow to whine, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” Her decrepit frame could have been crystallized in ice from November until Groundhog Day. But there I was, torturing my fragile, frozen body so the mailman wouldn’t slip and sue her ass.
“Well, I seem to be shoveling your walk,” I replied with overt hostility.
“Why?!” she asked, as if terribly offended.
“Because there’s snow on it?”
I’m sure that any other old lady would have smiled benevolently, patted my head, and offered me hot cocoa, a cookie, or a quarter (cause let’s be honest, elderly people are always paying you in quarters). This woman, however, slammed the door in my face.
I heard that last week my dad shoveled out that same neighbor. She gave him forty bucks and a cup of coffee.
Figures.