My Aunt Ione called me on a Tuesday afternoon in January, the day after the blizzard finally blew itself out. I was in the bus garage at the Norway Lake school district, flat on my back on a creeper under Bus 14 with a drop light hooked to the frame, trying to figure out why its air brakes kept bleeding down overnight. My phone buzzed in the pocket of my coveralls, and when I saw her name on the screen I rolled out from under the bus so fast I bumped my head on the bumper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione doesn\u2019t call during the day. She is of the generation that believes long distance is expensive and phone calls are for emergencies, Christmas, and funerals, and she has never quite accepted that I live only six miles away. So when her name came up on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon, my stomach dropped before I even answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJessa,\u201d she said. Her voice was calm, the way it always is, the calm of a woman who spent thirty-eight years as a nurse at the hospital in Willmar. \u201cI don\u2019t want you to worry. But I wondered if you might have time to come by this week.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAre you all right? Is it your heart?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy heart\u2019s fine,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s my pills I\u2019m worried about. The post office is holding my mail. I called them this morning. They said the carrier can\u2019t get to my box, so they\u2019ve been holding it at the counter in Sunburg. My heart pills are in there, from the mail-order pharmacy.\u201d She paused. \u201cI have through Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat up on the creeper with my back against the bus tire. Aunt Ione takes a pill called Eliquis for her heart, and another one for her blood pressure, and she gets them in a three-month supply through the mail from the Medicare pharmacy her insurance uses. She is the most organized person I have ever known. She orders her refills two weeks early, every time, and keeps a little calendar on her refrigerator where she checks off each day\u2019s pills with a pencil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow long since you\u2019ve had mail, Aunt Ione?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was quiet on the line, and I could hear her counting under her breath the way she counts everything, carefully, touching each day on that refrigerator calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNine days,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nine days. I closed my eyes. The first storm had come through the Friday before last, a foot of heavy snow that turned to ice on top, and then the blizzard had hit Sunday night and blown for two straight days. Twenty-two inches on top of what was already down, with the wind gusting to fifty and the drifts on the township road as high as a pickup cab. The plows had been out on County Road 14 since Monday night, but the township road where Aunt Ione lives had only been opened that morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIs the road clear now?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe road\u2019s clear,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s my driveway that isn\u2019t. Or the end of it, anyway. The carrier can\u2019t get to the box.\u201d She paused again. \u201cIt\u2019s Hollis\u2019s snow, Jessa. Same as always. Only this time it\u2019s taller than I am.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Two: The Berm<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My Aunt Ione never married. She is my father\u2019s older sister, eighty-three years old, and she has lived alone in the red farmhouse at the end of Brandvold Road for most of her life. Our family farmed that land for a hundred years, until my grandfather sold the fields to the neighbors in the eighties, but he kept the house and the five acres around it and gave them to Ione, because she was the one who came home from nursing school to take care of him and Grandma when they got old. She has been there ever since, with her garden and her bird feeders and her gray cat named Thor, and her red mailbox at the end of a gravel drive that runs out to the township road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her driveway sits right beside Hollis Brandvold\u2019s lane. The two of them run side by side out to the road, maybe fifty feet apart, with a strip of grass and a row of lilacs between them. The Brandvolds have farmed the place across the lilacs since the 1880s, and the road itself is named after them. Hollis is forty-four now, and he took over the farm when his father died two springs ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every storm, Hollis turned his blade to the right. He plows his own lane with a big blade on the front of an old John Deere, a quarter mile from his yard out to the road, and when he gets to the end of it, he swings the tractor around and shoves everything he\u2019s pushed off to the right side. Off to the right is the end of Aunt Ione\u2019s driveway. Every scoop landed there, right in front of her mailbox, and by morning it was packed hard as a curb, a ridge of plowed snow and ice that froze solid overnight and wouldn\u2019t move for anything short of a jackhammer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last winter there were nine storms. Every single one left a new ridge at the end of Aunt Ione\u2019s drive, a little taller than the one before. She is eighty-three years old and five foot one, and every single time she went out with a shovel and chipped her way through it so she could get her car out and the carrier could reach her box. Sometimes it took her two hours. Twice, I drove out after work and did it for her in the dark with a pick and a scoop shovel while she stood on her porch with a flashlight, telling me to be careful of my back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I asked Hollis twice, nicely. The first time was in December of last year, after the third storm, when I happened to see him at the Cenex in Sunburg filling his pickup. I walked over and said hello and asked if he could maybe angle his blade the other way when he got to the end of his lane, toward the field on the left, because the snow was piling up across Aunt Ione\u2019s drive. He listened politely, a big quiet man in a seed cap and a canvas chore coat, and then he shrugged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSnow\u2019s got to go somewhere, Jessa,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the way Dad always pushed it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second time was in February, after the sixth storm. I drove over to his place on a Saturday and knocked on his door, and he came out on the step in his socks looking tired and rumpled, and I asked him again. He said he\u2019d try to remember. He didn\u2019t. The next storm, the ridge was back, a little taller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His late father, Arvid, had pushed snow that way for forty years. That was the part I couldn\u2019t understand. In forty years, I never once heard Aunt Ione complain about the end of her driveway. I never once saw a ridge there when I was growing up, never once had to shovel it out, never once heard her mention it. It was only after Arvid died and Hollis took over the tractor that the berm appeared. I didn\u2019t think Hollis had ever once looked back to see where his snow landed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I could have called the township. There\u2019s a state law in Minnesota against pushing snow out onto a public road, and the township board would have sent Hollis a letter. But his snow wasn\u2019t on the road, exactly. It was on the end of my aunt\u2019s private drive, which was a different kind of problem, the kind you settle with a lawyer and a lot of bad feelings. And a feud between the two families on Brandvold Road would take months to sort out. It would not get Aunt Ione her heart pills by Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Three: Dad\u2019s Loader<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fix school buses for a living. I\u2019ve been the head mechanic for the Norway Lake district for eleven years, keeping fourteen buses running through Minnesota winters that would kill a lesser machine. I know diesel engines and air brakes and hydraulics, and I know what cold does to all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I don\u2019t own is anything that can move twenty-two inches of packed snow. I have a pickup with a plow on it, but a pickup plow won\u2019t touch a frozen berm. I needed something with real weight and real power and a bucket. I needed my dad\u2019s loader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My dad is seventy, and he had a brand-new knee. Dr. Halvorson in Willmar replaced his left one in December, three weeks before Christmas, and he was still walking with a cane and doing his exercises every morning at the kitchen table, lifting his leg with a strap. He was supposed to stay off ladders and out of cold weather for another month. He couldn\u2019t climb up on his old yellow loader yet, and he hated it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The loader is a 1978 John Deere, an old four-wheel-drive farm loader with a big bucket on the front and an open seat on top with no cab at all. Dad bought it at a farm sale in Kandiyohi County thirty years ago for six thousand dollars, and he has used it every winter since to clear his own yard and half the neighbors\u2019 too. It is ugly and loud and slow, and it has never once failed to start, though sometimes it takes some convincing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drove over to Dad\u2019s place after work on Tuesday and found him in his recliner with his leg up on a pillow, watching the weather on Channel 11 out of Minneapolis. I told him about Aunt Ione\u2019s pills and the post office and the nine days. He listened without saying anything, his jaw getting tighter the whole time, and when I got to the part about the ridge being taller than she is, he set the remote down on the arm of his chair very carefully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat Brandvold boy,\u201d he said. \u201cHis dad never did that. Not once in forty years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know, Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked down at his knee, propped up on the pillow, and I could see him wanting to get up and go do it himself. Then he let out a long breath and pointed toward the back door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cKey\u2019s on the nail,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the shop, by the door. Plug the block heater in tonight, or she won\u2019t start in the morning. Supposed to be ten below.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThank you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd Jessa.\u201d He looked at me. \u201cWear your good gloves. The leather ones with the liners. That seat\u2019s wide open, and at ten below, you\u2019ll feel every mile.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went out to the shop and found the key hanging on its nail where it\u2019s hung my whole life, on a ring with a little brass tag that says JD in Dad\u2019s handwriting. I ran an extension cord out to the loader and plugged in the block heater so the engine would stay warm overnight. Then I stood there in the cold shop for a minute with my hand on the big yellow tire, thinking about Aunt Ione chipping at that ridge alone with her shovel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Four: Ten Below<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At first light on Wednesday it was ten below. There wasn\u2019t a cloud anywhere, just bright, hard blue sky the way it gets after a blizzard moves through, and the snow lay over everything like a fresh white sheet with long blue shadows stretching across it. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. Every sound carried for a mile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pulled my gray knit cap down over my ponytail and zipped my green work coat all the way to my chin. I had two pairs of wool socks inside my insulated boots, Dad\u2019s leather gloves with the liners, and a scarf my mother knitted wrapped twice around my face. I still felt the cold the second I stepped out of my pickup in Dad\u2019s yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The loader started on the third try. The first try it groaned and turned over slowly and didn\u2019t catch. The second try it coughed once and died. The third time it roared to life and blew a cloud of black smoke out of the stack, and then it settled into a rough, steady rumble, and I sat there on the cold seat letting it warm up while my breath froze on my scarf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It has an open cab, which means no cab at all, just a seat and a steering wheel and the levers, with nothing between you and the weather. At ten below, driving down a township road at fifteen miles an hour, the wind cuts through everything you\u2019re wearing. By the time I\u2019d gone the two miles from Dad\u2019s place to Brandvold Road, I couldn\u2019t feel my nose, and my eyes were watering so hard the tears froze on my eyelashes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went to Aunt Ione\u2019s first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was already out by her mailbox when I came around the curve, standing at the end of her driveway in her long navy wool coat, the one she has worn to church every Sunday since 1979. She had a white knit hat pulled over her white hair and a pair of old leather mittens on, and she had a shovel in her hands. She was chipping at the ridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was taller than she was. I could see that from the road. Hollis\u2019s blade had shoved it up into a hard wall of ice and packed snow maybe five feet high, running all the way across the end of her drive and around her red mailbox, so the box stuck up out of the top of it like a flag on a mountain. And my eighty-three-year-old aunt was standing in front of it with a square-nosed shovel, chipping away little pieces of ice, one at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pulled the loader up beside her and shut the throttle down so I could hear. She turned around and looked up at me, and her cheeks were bright red from the cold, and her eyes were watering too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJessa,\u201d she said. \u201cI was going to get it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know you were, Aunt Ione.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been out here since seven. I got about this much.\u201d She showed me a little notch she\u2019d chipped in the top of the ridge, maybe six inches deep. \u201cI just thought, if I could get to the box, the carrier could bring my pills tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cStep back,\u201d I said. \u201cOver by the lilacs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She stepped back. I dropped the bucket and drove into that ridge, and the loader shuddered when it hit the packed ice, but it broke. The first bite took the top off it. The second bite opened a notch down to the gravel. I backed up and came at it from the side, and the third bite cleared most of the wall in front of her mailbox, and the fourth bite pushed the last of it off into the ditch on the left side, toward the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I broke that ridge open in four bites. It took maybe three minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it was done, I shut the loader down and sat there for a second in the sudden quiet. Aunt Ione walked out to her mailbox, picking her way carefully over the broken chunks of ice, and stopped in front of it. She reached up and put her mittened hand on top of the red box. She just left it there, resting on the top, the way you\u2019d put your hand on the shoulder of an old friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been looking at this box for nine days,\u201d she said quietly. \u201cFrom my kitchen window.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t say anything. My throat was too tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Five: Eleven Walls<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I looked down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brandvold Road runs a mile and a half from County Road 14 to where it dead-ends at Norway Lake, and there are eleven houses on it, counting Aunt Ione\u2019s and Hollis\u2019s. From the seat of the loader, sitting up high in the cold, I could see the whole length of it in the bright morning sun. The township plow had come through that morning and opened the road itself, one lane wide with high walls of snow on either side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And at the end of every single driveway, there was a wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The township plow had done the same thing to everybody that Hollis had done to Aunt Ione. When a road plow comes through after a blizzard, it shoves everything off to the side, and everything off to the side lands right across the end of everybody\u2019s driveway. Every house on Brandvold Road had a packed ridge of snow and ice across the end of its drive, some of them four feet tall. Eleven houses. Eleven walls of snow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat there on the loader for a long time looking at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I only did Aunt Ione\u2019s, it would be a feud. That\u2019s how it would look. Everybody on the road would see that Leroy Thorvaldson\u2019s daughter fired up his loader and cleared her aunt\u2019s drive and left the Brandvold berm sitting there for the whole world to look at, and it would be one family against another. People would take sides. People would talk at church and at the Cenex. Hollis would hear about it, and the next storm he\u2019d push the snow right back where it was out of pure stubbornness, and it would go on for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if I did the whole road, it was just neighbors after a storm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next house down was Gus Lindquist\u2019s, a little white house at the curve where the road bends toward the lake. Gus is seventy-nine, a widower since last spring. His wife, Ruth, died of cancer in April, and since then he mostly stays inside watching the Twins on TV and the Weather Channel. His ridge was three feet high across his drive, and his old Buick was buried to the door handles in his yard. I broke the ridge in three bites and cleared a path up to his garage, and when I came back down to the road, he was standing on his front step in a bathrobe and a stocking cap, holding a coffee cup in both hands, staring at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThank you, Jessa,\u201d he called. His voice sounded rusty. \u201cI didn\u2019t know how I was going to get to church Sunday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Past Gus was a young family in a new house, a gray split-level built three years ago. Tess Anderson is twenty-eight, a nurse\u2019s aide at the care center in Sunburg, and she has twin boys who are four. Her husband drives truck and was somewhere in Montana. She was out in her drive with a snow shovel and both boys in snowsuits, trying to dig out her minivan, and when I came up the road she put the shovel down and burst into tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got a shift at two,\u201d she said, when I stopped the loader. \u201cIf I don\u2019t get there, they\u2019ll cut my hours. I\u2019ve been out here since six.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I cleared her driveway and her parking pad and a path to the front door, and the twin boys stood in the snowbank by the mailbox the whole time, waving at me with both arms and shouting \u201cTractor!\u201d every time I went by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Six: Merle\u2019s Eggs<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People came out onto the shoulders in their boots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t notice it at first. I was busy with the loader, working the levers with my frozen hands, backing and turning and dropping the bucket. But somewhere around the fourth house, I looked up and saw people standing at the end of their driveways in the cold, in their chore coats and Sorel boots and stocking caps, watching. Some of them were out shoveling their own front walks. Some of them were just standing there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Somebody handed me coffee. At the fifth house, the Halvorsens\u2019, Judy Halvorsen came out to the road in her husband\u2019s barn coat carrying a thermos and handed it up to me without a word. It was so hot it burned my lips, and I drank half of it sitting on the loader seat with steam rising off the cup into the frozen air. When I tried to give the thermos back, she shook her head and told me to keep it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Merle Anderson lives at the sixth house, a little farmhouse with a red barn and a chicken coop out back. He\u2019s eighty-eight, no relation to Tess, a retired dairy farmer who still keeps two dozen laying hens because he says he wouldn\u2019t know what to do with himself in the morning without them. He couldn\u2019t reach his chickens. The drift between his back door and the coop was five feet deep, and he\u2019d been tossing feed out his kitchen window into the snow for two days and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I cleared his driveway, and then I took the loader around back and cut a path from his door to the coop. Merle stood on his back step in a buffalo plaid hunting coat leaning on a broom, watching me, and when I was done, he climbed carefully down the steps and walked out to the loader. He reached up and set something on the step beside my boot. It was a cardboard egg carton, a dozen brown eggs, still warm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom the girls,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve been laying the whole storm. Couldn\u2019t get them to anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the seventh place, I cleared Sonja Hagen\u2019s dairy. Sonja runs sixty cows with her son, and the milk truck from the co-op in Litchfield was due at ten o\u2019clock. Her son had cleared the yard with their skid steer, but the end of their lane was buried, and if that milk truck couldn\u2019t get in, they\u2019d have to dump two days of milk. I cleared the lane and the turnaround in twenty minutes, and when I came back out to the road at nine-fifty, the big silver milk tanker was just coming around the curve. The driver honked twice and waved as he went by me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the ninth driveway, they were waving from every porch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t wave back much. My hands were busy on the levers, and my fingers were so cold inside Dad\u2019s gloves I could barely feel them, and my throat was tight in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. I kept my head down and kept working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the tenth house, the Petersons\u2019, somebody came up beside the loader on foot. It was Darlene Sundquist, the rural mail carrier, in her Postal Service parka with the eagle patch on the shoulder. Her car was parked on the road behind me with its flashers on, a little Jeep with the steering wheel on the right side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI heard what you\u2019re doing,\u201d she said, shouting over the engine. \u201cYour aunt called the post office. She told them to send me out.\u201d She held up a big white plastic tub full of mail. \u201cNine days of it, for this whole road. I\u2019ve been following you house to house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked back down the road behind me. Sure enough, at every mailbox I\u2019d cleared, the little red flag was down and the door was shut. Darlene had been right behind me the whole time, filling them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDid my aunt get her pills?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Darlene smiled. \u201cFirst stop,\u201d she said. \u201cShe was standing right there waiting for me with her hand on the box.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Seven: The Last Lane<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ten driveways by twenty past eleven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That left one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat on the loader at the end of the Peterson drive with the engine idling and looked back up the road toward Aunt Ione\u2019s. From there, I could see Hollis Brandvold\u2019s lane running north from the road through his snowy fields, a quarter mile to his yard and his big white farmhouse and his red barns. His lane was still drifted shut. The blizzard had piled it four and five feet deep in places, and the township plow had walled off the end of it with a ridge as tall as the one I\u2019d broken at Aunt Ione\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis works nights. He drives a forklift on the night shift at the turkey processing plant in Willmar, eleven at night to seven in the morning, and he farms his land in between. I knew he must have gone in to work Tuesday night somehow, maybe with a buddy who had a four-by-four, and gotten a ride back that morning. His pickup was buried in his yard. He\u2019d be asleep now, I figured, with his curtains pulled, sleeping off a ten-hour shift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I could have stopped right there. Ten out of eleven. Nobody on that road would have blamed me. Some of them would have said it served him right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I cleared it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drove the loader up to the end of his lane and broke through the township ridge in four bites, the same as I\u2019d done at Aunt Ione\u2019s. Then I started up the lane toward his yard. A quarter mile of drifted snow, packed hard by two days of wind. It took me twenty minutes, bucket after bucket, pushing forward and backing up and pushing forward again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And every single scoop, I pushed left into the field. Every bucketful of snow I took off Hollis Brandvold\u2019s lane, I carried to the left side and dumped it in his own field, away from the lilacs and away from Aunt Ione\u2019s drive. A quarter mile of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I got to his yard, I cleared a turnaround in front of his garage so he could get his pickup out. Then I backed all the way down the lane to the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I scraped the last of his old berm off Aunt Ione\u2019s drive. There was still a little left there along the edge of her driveway, the bottom layers of last winter\u2019s ridges and this winter\u2019s, packed down and frozen into the gravel, a hard gray crust maybe eight inches thick. I dropped the edge of the bucket and scraped it, carefully, back and forth, the way Dad taught me to scrape a yard so you don\u2019t tear up the gravel underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I scraped it down to bare gravel. Brown and gray and dry in the cold sun, with the snow pushed back neatly on both sides. You could see exactly where Aunt Ione\u2019s driveway ended and Hollis\u2019s lane began, with the strip of grass and the lilacs in between, clean and clear for the first time in two winters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I shut the loader off at 11:52.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Eight: The Door<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole road went quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don\u2019t realize how loud a loader is until you shut it off. That big old diesel had been roaring in my ears for five hours, and when I turned the key, the silence came down like a blanket. I could hear the wind moving across the snow in the fields. I could hear a cow lowing over at Sonja\u2019s dairy and Merle\u2019s chickens clucking a quarter mile away. I could hear my own heartbeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat there on the cold seat at the end of Aunt Ione\u2019s drive and looked down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every single neighbor was out. I don\u2019t know when it happened. Sometime in the last hour, while I was clearing Hollis\u2019s lane, they\u2019d all come out of their houses and walked to the ends of their driveways, the ones I\u2019d cleared that morning. Gus in his bathrobe and stocking cap. Tess with her twin boys in their snowsuits. Judy Halvorsen. Merle with his broom. Sonja and her son from the dairy. The Petersons. Darlene the mail carrier was still there too, leaning on the hood of her Jeep with a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione came out of her house and walked down her clean gravel drive to stand beside the loader. She had her shovel. She leaned on it beside me, in her navy wool coat, and looked down the road with the rest of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s when Hollis\u2019s front door opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Across the lilacs and a quarter mile up his newly cleared lane, the front door of the big white Brandvold farmhouse swung open. Hollis came out onto his front step. He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt and no coat at all, with his hair sticking up on one side from sleeping. He must have heard the loader. Or maybe he\u2019d heard the silence when it stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked at his lane first. A quarter mile of it, cleared and smooth all the way to the road, with the snow pushed off to the left into his field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he looked at the end of it, at Aunt Ione\u2019s driveway beside his, scraped down to bare gravel where his ridge had been. Where his ridge had been for two winters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he looked down the road at every neighbor he had, standing in the sun, looking back at him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody said a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stood on his front step in his T-shirt at ten below zero for what felt like a very long time. I couldn\u2019t see his face from that distance, only the shape of him, a big man standing very still in a doorway. Then he went back inside, and I thought maybe that was it. Maybe he\u2019d just close the door and go back to bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He came back out a minute later in his canvas chore coat and his boots, unlaced. He came down his step. And he started walking toward us down his lane, slow, with his hands at his sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Nine: What Arvid Did<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took him five minutes to walk the quarter mile. Nobody on the road moved. Nobody went back inside. We all just stood there and watched him come, a big man walking slowly down a cleared lane between two walls of snow, his breath steaming in front of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stopped at the end of his lane, right beside the strip of lilacs. Aunt Ione\u2019s bare gravel was on his left. The loader was there, and me on it, and Aunt Ione standing beside it with her shovel. He looked at the gravel for a long time. Then he looked up at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou did my lane,\u201d he said. His voice was rough with sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI did everybody\u2019s,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou pushed it left.\u201d He looked back up the lane, at the snow piled neatly in his field. \u201cInto my field.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSnow\u2019s got to go somewhere, Hollis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He flinched. I hadn\u2019t meant it to sting, exactly, but I watched it land. He looked down at the gravel again, at the end of Aunt Ione\u2019s drive where his ridge had been, and I saw something move across his face that I didn\u2019t expect. It wasn\u2019t anger. It was something closer to confusion, like a man trying to remember something he\u2019d forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he looked at Aunt Ione.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t look,\u201d he said quietly. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Ione. I just never looked. I come home off a night shift at seven in the morning and I\u2019m so tired I can\u2019t see straight, and I just get on the tractor and push the lane the way Dad always pushed it. I never once turned around to see where it landed.\u201d He shook his head. \u201cJessa asked me. Twice. And I just figured, it\u2019s how it\u2019s always been done. Dad pushed it that way forty years, and you never said a word to him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione leaned on her shovel and looked at him for a long time. She didn\u2019t say anything at first. Then she took one hand off the shovel and set it on his arm, and her voice when she spoke was very gentle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHollis,\u201d she said. \u201cYour father never left a ridge on my driveway. Not once in forty years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis frowned. \u201cHe pushed it the same way I do. To the right. I watched him do it my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe did,\u201d Aunt Ione said. \u201cHe pushed it to the right. And then every single time, after he finished his lane, he turned that tractor around and came back and cleared the end of my drive. Every storm. Forty years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The road was dead silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe\u2019d do his own lane,\u201d Aunt Ione went on, \u201cand push it to the right, because that was the way the wind blew and the way his father pushed it, and the left side drifted worse. And then he\u2019d come back and scoop my ridge out and push it across the road into the ditch. And then he\u2019d park his tractor by my lilacs and come in my back door and have a cup of coffee at my kitchen table.\u201d She paused. \u201cEvery storm, Hollis. Every single one. Since 1983.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis stared at her. \u201cI never knew that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know you didn\u2019t,\u201d she said. \u201cYou were in school. Then you were off working. Then you came home, and he was getting old, and you probably thought he was out checking cattle.\u201d She almost smiled. \u201cHe was checking on me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Ten: The Cup on the Hook<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She took us all into her kitchen after that. Not the whole road, but Hollis and me. The neighbors drifted back to their houses one by one, Gus and Tess and Merle and the rest, and Darlene drove off in her Jeep to finish her route. Aunt Ione told me to bring Merle\u2019s eggs inside before they froze, and she put a pot of coffee on, and she sat Hollis down at her kitchen table in the chair by the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He sat there looking around her kitchen like he\u2019d never seen it before. He probably hadn\u2019t. In forty-four years of living fifty feet away, I don\u2019t think Hollis Brandvold had ever once been inside Aunt Ione\u2019s house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was a row of hooks by her back door, the kind you hang coats on. On the last hook, beside her own navy coat and her barn jacket, hung a coffee cup. A big white enamel mug, chipped around the rim, with a faded green John Deere logo on the side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione took it down off the hook. She washed it in the sink and dried it carefully with a dish towel, and then she filled it with coffee and set it down in front of Hollis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat was his cup,\u201d she said. \u201cHe kept it here. He said my coffee was better than yours.\u201d She sat down across from him. \u201cIt\u2019s been on that hook since the January before he died. The last storm before his stroke.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis put both his hands around the cup and didn\u2019t drink. He just held it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow long?\u201d he asked finally. \u201cHim and you. How long?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione was quiet for a long time. She looked out her kitchen window, past the lilacs, toward the Brandvold farmhouse a quarter mile up the lane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were sweethearts in high school,\u201d she said. \u201c1959. He gave me a class ring. I still have it in my jewelry box.\u201d She smiled a little. \u201cI went down to Minneapolis for nursing school at Swedish Hospital, and he wrote me every week for two years. And then his father had a heart attack, and Arvid had to take over the farm at nineteen. And there was a girl from church whose family had the land across the road.\u201d She shook her head. \u201cHis mother wanted the two farms together. And I was in Minneapolis. And Arvid was nineteen and scared and had a whole farm on his shoulders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe married my mother,\u201d Hollis said quietly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe married your mother,\u201d Aunt Ione said. \u201cMarit. She was a good woman, Hollis. I want you to know that. I never once said a bad word about her, and neither did he. They had a good marriage. They had you.\u201d She folded her hands on the table. \u201cI came home in 1964 to take care of my parents, and I lived here fifty feet from them for thirty years, and I was glad for them. I truly was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd the driveway?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat started the winter of 1983,\u201d she said. \u201cMy father died that November, and I was alone in this house for the first time. The first big storm, Arvid pushed his lane, and I came out in the morning and found a four-foot ridge across my drive. And I stood out there with a shovel crying, because I\u2019d just buried my father, and I couldn\u2019t get my car out to go to work.\u201d She took a breath. \u201cAnd Arvid saw me from his yard. And he came back with the tractor and cleared it. And he came in for coffee. And he never once left a ridge again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDid my mother know?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour mother knew,\u201d Aunt Ione said. \u201cMarit knew. She used to send pie over with him sometimes. She knew it was just coffee and a clean driveway between two old friends. She died in 2012, God rest her.\u201d She paused. \u201cAfter that, he\u2019d stay a little longer. That\u2019s all. An hour, maybe, on a storm morning. We\u2019d talk about the weather and the Twins and the price of corn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis set the cup down on the table and put his face in his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Eleven: Forty Years<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He sat at Aunt Ione\u2019s kitchen table for a long time without saying anything. I stood at the counter by the coffee pot and didn\u2019t move. Thor the gray cat came in from the living room and jumped up on the empty chair beside him and sat there watching him with yellow eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know,\u201d Hollis said finally, through his fingers. \u201cForty years. I watched him push that lane every winter. I rode on the tractor with him when I was little. And I never once saw him go back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t want you to,\u201d Aunt Ione said. \u201cHe was a private man, your father. He didn\u2019t want anybody making something of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis took his hands away from his face. His eyes were red. \u201cWhen he had his stroke,\u201d he said slowly, \u201cand he was in the hospital in Willmar, in those last few days, he kept trying to tell me something. He couldn\u2019t talk right. He kept saying \u2018the drive, the drive.\u2019 I thought he meant the tractor. I told him I\u2019d keep it running.\u201d He shook his head. \u201cI told him not to worry, I\u2019d keep pushing the lane just like he did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione reached across the table and put her hand on top of his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe meant mine,\u201d she said softly. \u201cI expect he meant mine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis broke then. He put his head down on Aunt Ione\u2019s kitchen table, right beside his father\u2019s chipped coffee cup, and he cried the way men out here almost never cry, with his whole body. Aunt Ione kept her hand on his and didn\u2019t say anything. She just let him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I turned around and looked out the window over the sink at the bare gravel at the end of her drive, at the lilacs and the clean lane running up to the Brandvold place, and I had to wipe my own eyes with the back of Dad\u2019s leather glove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Hollis finally sat up, he wiped his face on the sleeve of his chore coat and picked up the coffee cup and drank from it, slowly. Then he looked at me standing by the sink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJessa,\u201d he said. \u201cI owe you for the fuel. And your time. And your dad\u2019s loader.\u201d He swallowed. \u201cAnd for asking me twice, nicely, and me not listening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t owe me anything,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI owe this whole road,\u201d he said. He looked out the window at the cleared driveways. \u201cEvery one of them watched you do it. They all saw what I did to Ione\u2019s drive for two winters.\u201d He shook his head. \u201cMy dad would have been ashamed of me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour dad didn\u2019t know you didn\u2019t know,\u201d Aunt Ione said. \u201cHe\u2019d have forgiven you. He forgave himself for a lot worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis was quiet for a while. Then he reached into the pocket of his chore coat and took out his wallet, and I thought he was going to try to pay me, and I started to shake my head. But he didn\u2019t take out money. He took out a little folded piece of paper, soft and creased from being carried a long time, and he unfolded it on the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a list, written in pencil in an old man\u2019s shaky handwriting. Names and addresses. Every house on Brandvold Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI found this in Dad\u2019s tractor,\u201d Hollis said. \u201cIn the toolbox, after he died. I never knew what it was. I just kept it.\u201d He smoothed it flat. \u201cIone\u2019s name is at the top. Then Gus and Ruth. Then Merle. Then the Hagens.\u201d He looked up at us. \u201cHe didn\u2019t just do yours, did he, Ione.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione looked at the list for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cHe did whoever needed it. After a big storm, he\u2019d go down the road and do whoever couldn\u2019t do their own. The old ones, mostly. Ruth Lindquist when she got sick. Merle after his hip.\u201d She smiled. \u201cMine was just the first. And the one he stopped for coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter Twelve: The Next Storm<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next big storm came three weeks later, on a Sunday night in February. Fourteen inches, with wind. It wasn\u2019t as bad as the blizzard, but it was bad enough to close the schools on Monday, which meant I didn\u2019t have to go to the bus garage. I woke up at five-thirty and looked out my window at the snow coming down sideways in the yard light, and I thought about Aunt Ione.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got dressed and drove out to Dad\u2019s place to get the loader. Dad was up already, sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and his strap, doing his knee exercises. He\u2019d gotten the go-ahead from Dr. Halvorson the week before to start climbing again, carefully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou\u2019re going out to Ione\u2019s?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI was going to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked at me over his coffee cup. \u201cYou might want to call her first,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t understand. I called her anyway, from Dad\u2019s kitchen. She answered on the second ring, wide awake, and when I said I was coming with the loader, she laughed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDon\u2019t bother, honey,\u201d she said. \u201cMy drive\u2019s clear. Come have coffee if you want.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drove out anyway. It was just getting light when I came around the curve onto Brandvold Road, and the snow had stopped, and the fields were white and blue in the dawn. And at the end of every single driveway on that road, the ridge was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gus\u2019s drive was clear. Tess\u2019s drive was clear, and her minivan was already gone to work. Merle\u2019s was clear, with a path cut back to his chicken coop. Sonja\u2019s lane was open for the milk truck. All the way down the road, eleven driveways, every one of them scraped down to gravel with the snow pushed off neatly to the side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And at the end of Hollis\u2019s lane, his old green John Deere was parked beside the lilacs, with its blade down and its engine ticking as it cooled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pulled my pickup in at the end of Aunt Ione\u2019s drive. Clear. Scraped to gravel. Not a ridge anywhere. I walked up to her back door and knocked, and she called for me to come in, and I opened the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis was sitting at her kitchen table in his chore coat, in the chair by the window, with his father\u2019s chipped white John Deere cup in his hands. Aunt Ione was across from him in her bathrobe, with her own cup and a plate of the egg bake she makes with Merle\u2019s eggs. Thor was asleep on the third chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hollis looked up when I came in. He looked tired, the way a man looks after a night shift and a morning on a tractor in the snow. But he was smiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI got off at seven,\u201d he said. \u201cPushed my lane to the left. Then I came down and did yours, Ione\u2019s. Then I figured I might as well keep going.\u201d He held up the folded pencil list from his father\u2019s toolbox. \u201cDid the whole road. Took me two hours.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe did it the way your grandfather taught me,\u201d Aunt Ione said to me. \u201cDown to gravel, and the snow off to the side where it won\u2019t drift back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI asked Dad\u2019s friend Merle how he used to do it,\u201d Hollis said. \u201cHe told me. Then he gave me a dozen eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione got up and poured me a cup of coffee and set it down at the empty place, and I sat down across from Hollis at her kitchen table, in the warm, with the snow outside the window going gold in the morning sun. For a while nobody said anything. We just drank our coffee and listened to the furnace hum and Thor snore on his chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then Hollis set his cup down on the table, and he looked across at Aunt Ione, and he said something I\u2019ll remember for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIone,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery storm. As long as I\u2019ve got a tractor.\u201d He looked at the chipped white cup in front of him. \u201cAnd then I\u2019ll come in for coffee. If that\u2019s all right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione looked at him for a long moment, and her eyes were wet, and she smiled the way I haven\u2019t seen her smile since I was a little girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s all right, Hollis,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s always been all right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he left that morning, he didn\u2019t take his father\u2019s cup with him. He washed it at her sink and dried it with her dish towel, and then he walked over to the row of hooks by her back door and hung it back up on the last hook, beside her navy coat, where it had hung for forty years. Then he went out the door, and I watched through the kitchen window as he climbed up on his old green tractor beside the lilacs and drove slowly back up his clean lane toward home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aunt Ione stood at the window beside me and watched him go too. When he was out of sight, she turned around and looked at the cup on its hook for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHis father\u2019s hands,\u201d she said softly, almost to herself. \u201cExactly his father\u2019s hands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she sat back down at her table, and finished her coffee, and reached for her pencil to check off one more day on the refrigerator calendar, the way she does every morning, carefully, touching each box. Outside, the little red flag on her mailbox stood up straight in the cold sun, waiting for Darlene to come down a clear road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Aunt Ione called me on a Tuesday afternoon in January, the day after the blizzard finally blew itself out. I was in the bus garage at the Norway Lake school district, flat on my back on a creeper under Bus 14 with a drop light hooked to the frame, trying to figure out why …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26157"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26160,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26157\/revisions\/26160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cehre.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}