Say it ain't snow

I can only imagine what the neighbors are saying. But in my defense I want you to know it wasn't my idea. You also need to know I've shoveled more snow than half the inhabitants of Siberia.

It is uncanny. Every driveway of every house I've owned has been cursed. It might snow an inch across city and county and state. In my driveway there will be a foot. I'll walk outside after a storm and the neighbors will be sweeping the snow away. My driveway will look like our Lord and Snowmaker has spent the night sifting flour on my house. Before long kids from up and down the block will emerge, snowboards tucked under their arms, and start ripping sick half-pipes off the garage. Trailing behind the little buggers will be entire teams of St. Bernards and behind them Swiss yodelers and Sherpas.

I have scooped snow, pushed snow, carried snow and carted it. I have hauled snow, heaved snow, hoisted snow and lugged it. For almost a decade I lived in Grand Forks, N.D., and for almost all of that time I lived in a house that had a driveway so long, it is visible from the moon.

A piece of advice: If you ever find yourself living in Grand Forks, N.D., do not buy a house that has a long driveway. In fact, find a house that doesn't have a driveway at all. In Grand Forks, you see, it doesn't even have to snow for drifts to stretch across your driveway big enough to swallow caravans of vacationing Canadians. All it takes is wind, and in Grand Forks, if the wind isn't blowing, you should see a doctor. You're probably dead.

Shoveling that driveway was my own personal Green Mile. There were years I would start in October and not finish until June. I despised that driveway, and when I sold that house and moved to another, I didn't sneer and stick up a certain finger from the moving van window. But I should have.

The driveway at the next house I owned was considerably shorter – and categorically worse. You might have seen the driveway on TV. It was the site of the 1996 Winter Olympics. Even the Sherpas stayed home that winter.

What I did to deserve this penance, I do not know. There is so much to choose from. But a driveway deep in snow is my cross. I've come to accept that. Heaven forbid I should end up in the catacombs of Hell someday, but if I do, I am certain 10-foot snowdrifts and a teaspoon await me.

I could get a snow blower. The thought has crossed my mind. But after all these years, frankly, it has become a test of wills, this struggle between snow and me. Perhaps all this shoveling has frosted my brain, but I feel like I'm in an epic battle between man and nature. If I buy a snow blower, I'll be surrendering. I'll be raising a white flag, which, if waved from my driveway, no one would see anyway, so what good would it do.

Plus I'm cheap.

So when I walked into the kitchen Monday morning and found my wife wearing snow boots and mittens and my driveway clean of that night's slushy heap, I had mixed emotions. A part of me – an extremely small part, minute, imperceptible to the naked eye – thought: "I am pathetic." The rest of me thought: "Heck yes!"

Let me reiterate. I did not know she was out there shoveling while I slept. My wife sets her alarm clock for 5 a.m. For the past 25 years that clock has screeched at that infernal hour. If she wants to get up when only dairy farmers and the dead are stirring, that's her business. But there is no way I am rolling out of the rack at that time unless there is a fishing boat or a duck blind in my immediate future.

My wife has given birth to three children. So what's a little snow to her? Still, it must have been quite a sight: All the neighbor men maneuvering their snow blowers in the early-morning gloom, their muffled churning collecting in the crisp March air, and there in front of the Okerlund house, a solitary shoveler, slight in frame, her cream-colored scarf tight against her neck, toiling mightily.

To be completely honest, it wasn't the first time this woman has shoveled in my stead this winter. She tells me she doesn't mind. It is good exercise, she tells me.

What's there for me to say? Except thanks.