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The Family Room by Michelle Martin

March 2, 2008

Salute to shovelers

All hail the snow shovelers, the people who make the effort to come outside and clear the snow and ice off their sidewalks.

They are the people I see on early morning jaunts with the dog, pushing their shovels and guiding their snowblowers in time for the morning rush.

They are the people who put salt down on their walks before they freeze into slippery obstacle courses.

As far as I know, clearing the walks is not listed among the corporal works of mercy, and if the law requires it, that law isn’t enforced very often.

But the people who clear their walks perform a service for everyone who uses them to get to school, to the bus stop or to the store. It’s especially important for those who have babies in strollers — or who forgot to wear their boots.

As much as I appreciate the snow shovelers, I’m not always among them.

I try, I really do. But sometimes the snow manages to fall when I’m not there to shovel right away. And with a school down the block, the snow gets trampled and packed down and impossible to remove in short order.

Then, in a winter like this, it will thaw to sloppy slush, then freeze to impenetrable ice. Then — bags and bags of salt later — it will weaken, and we will attack it with shovels and spades, breaking it into chunks and pushing it off the sidewalk. Then it snows again, and I resolve to be the kind of person who clears the snow as soon as it falls.

When I was a kid, during the bad winters of the late ’70s, my dad said he didn’t need a snow blower because that’s what he had children for.

My brother and I — and, truth be told, my parents — cleared the driveway, the walk to the front porch and the sidewalks along the front and side of our corner lot. Then we went and shoveled the walks of an elderly neighbor who lived behind us.

Miss Elizabeth, the neighbor, would open the door and give us a dollar or two if she saw us, but we were forbidden to ask for money.

Even at that age, we knew better than to see shoveling her snow as a money-making proposition; taking her money and thanking her was more to make her feel that she wasn’t a charity case.

Now, when my husband gets the snow blower out before the snow is all trampled down, he’ll usually run it back and forth past the neighbor’s house too.

Frank gets in on the act, too, using a child-size shovel to shift the snow off the walk from the house to the garage. Caroline uses the shovel more often for fun, piling up snow in the backyard to make a sledding bunny hill for her and Frank to slide down.

Maybe that — making something fun for someone to play with — should be a work of mercy too.

Martin is assistant editor of the Catholic New World. Contact her at [email protected].