18 January, 2012

This is what my kids looked like today.

Wow! Crazy snow!  We haven’t even had enough for our ski resort to open, but it decided to start dumping snow at about an inch an hour, just in time for them to NOT cancel school.  After shoveling the driveway so my preschooler could spin cookies on his scooter, and playing snowball fetch with the dog in snow up to her belly, I embarked on the hour and a half trek to pick up my kindergartener.  I love the snow, and I love this city, but the two are never a good combination, and the roads were miserable and inadequately maintained.  Fortunately, we made it home with only one small run-in with a curb. I think it frightened the guy walking down the sidewalk in front of my now traffic-perpendicular car more than it scared me.  He was generous enough to come help push my front tires out of the gutter so I could get on my way.  Another kind passer-by in an oversized Jeep also stopped to help, but don’t think I didn’t notice the hint of smirk on his face as he guided me and my über-“mom car” back onto the street. Nonetheless, I waved many thanks as I fishtailed my way through the icy slush.

The events of the morning left me thankful. Thankful, firstly, to be home. But thankful overall that generosity and altruism are still alive and well.  Later this afternoon I bundled back up and headed out into the now steadily falling drizzle and grabbed my snow shovel. I shoveled the walks and driveways of two of my neighbors, one across the street who uses a wheelchair, whose tracks I had seen back and forth from his rampvan this morning, and then my next door neighbor who, undoubtedly, would have come home from work after dark and shoveled our neighbor’s driveway and then his own.  I found myself waiting to hear his truck pull onto the street, peeking around the curtains to see the expression on his face, feeling as giddy as a kid on Christmas.  I don’t mind that they will never know it is me, I feel a natural high just thinking of how my next-door neighbor felt being able to come home from work and be able to relax with his family instead of pushing around the ton of saturated snow coating both driveways.

Both emotionally and physically it was as good as, if not better than, staying inside to do that 30 minute yoga-for-abs workout I had been planning on.  Who would have guessed that so much unexpected good would have come out of this storm, these crappy roads, and sliding my car into a curb? Not me, but I’m glad it did.