On the first day, the snow falls. Thick and white and slow and lazy in the dark. I make the first hot chocolate of the season to celebrate and toast it as it comes down. The marshmallows are lukewarm and fuzzy by the time I eat them.
It’s lightly packed, good food for the shovel. Over and done inside half an hour.
On the second day, the snow falls again – a fine opening for the season. This time it’s thicker – there’s almost no air left between the flakes and every breath tastes like clouds. The second cup of hot chocolate contains twice the marshmallows to commemorate and affirm this circumstance.
Deeply fluffy with almost no packing. Hard to wrangle, but easy to move. An hour passes by.
Carl complains of it. I chuckle at his nonsense. It’ll take the edge off his beer gut.
On the third day, the snow has fallen overnight. Clots and humps and hills fill the driveway; the legacy of the plow’s passing.
There is real chunk and heft and grain to it now; stratification has set in. It doesn’t want to move, and it slides sullenly from the shovel’s blade.
I do my driveway, then help Carl shovel half of his. Exercise has its limits, and I’d hate to have to perform CPR on him.
On the fourth day, the snow creeps in slow, soft and early in the morning, hard and furious by mid-afternoon, gentle as a cat’s footfall by the evening. I must shovel my way back into my home, and my arms are sweaty weights already.
It is the same snow I shoveled yesterday. I feel familiarity in each sweep, and begin to worry that I will recognize some of the snowflakes.
Carl takes a break. Maybe he’s going to buy a snow blower. He mentioned that yesterday.
On the fifth day, the snow does not stop.
I shovel it in the morning, I shovel it in the afternoon, I shovel it in the evening. It does not stop it will not stop.
Where is Carl?
On the dawn of the sixth day I see footprints. So light, so fleeting, so beautiful above the driveway’s ever-growing walls they float effortlessly.
I trudge below unending. But my eyes are set above the banks now.
Carl’s snow blower is running. It spits and rumbles.
On the seventh day I do not wake because I have not slept. I have not eaten. I have not touched water.
I have put many icicles in my mouth and in the thaw and the melt I have seen many things, some of them even with my eyes.
Hooves and claws and teeth and eyes and breath and wind and the cold going on and on.
The shovel moves, but the greatest weight is not in my arms but in my mind. And it shifts.
Carl’s snow blower must have broken, he went back inside early.
On the eighth day I sanctify my car to Jack Frost. I back it up out of the garage and the winter tires – defiant of his will – are dismantled and thrown into the ditch, where his displeasure may cover them until spring. The windshield frosts, the snow mounds, and by day’s end it will have changed from a beast of angles and surfaces into a single white blob. Perfect and pure.
My shovel has seen the light now, and I am its best friend. I use it not to destroy, but to sculpt. The driveway is my canvas and my arm is my brush and I sing as I work, holy songs that flow from the cold air through my ears and into my brain stem.
Carl’s driveway is full.
On the ninth day, the power goes out. I am warm as I am shoveling.
The wind does exotic things to my drifts and dunes, sending the sleet sideways – what fun! What joy! I would laugh if opening my mouth wouldn’t choke me to death on snowflakes. Wrapped tight as I am I cultivate my temperature carefully: shovel too hard and I will burn myself from the inside out; shovel too slow and I will become an icicle. A shameful thing when I have so many other icicles to garden and tend.
Carl comes out in the evening when it abates. He carries his shovel poorly. He works fitfully. He swears childishly.
On the tenth day I sacrifice my garage in the name of Lady December.
The car’s gas tank is siphoned, the flame is lit, and the harsh hot burn takes away the defiler, the defier, the opponent of all that is cold and good in this world. The warmth is great but passing, as all heat must be. My shovel is my flag and my joy is great. I can feel the hands of many great things reaching down in the gales and patting me on the back and that makes me grow larger and bolder inside.
Carl attempts to phone some kind of authority, but I have been blessed with foresight and have placed his phone in the caring embrace of my Lady by placing it inside the high ramparts of the winter plow-walls, where once sidewalks were.
On the eleventh day I invite the masters inside by opening every door of my home, inside and out. The furnace, foul beast that it is, I slay with a sledgehammer. It dies grunting.
I am boiling hot now, too hot to wear clothes let alone a jacket. I must scrub myself with snow to quench this horrible heat. My teeth chatter with it and my hands shake and sizzle.
On the twelfth day I killed Carl. He set his house aflame and at first I thought he had seen the truth but all he would tell me was ‘NO SHOVELING NO MORE SHOVELING’ and I became enraged and smote him. It was very clumsy of me.
On the thirteenth day I wake and find that several of my toes have been blessed with icicles. I rejoice and leave them be to their new lives and also one of my fingers.
My nose came off at some point too I guess.
I’m finally not warm anymore!
I am done shovelling!
I am here! I am cold! I am happy!