I’ve never spoken to him again. He’s much older now, and I see him walking through my route or shooting hoops in the schoolyard with his buddies. He never waves or acknowledges me, but when our eyes meet, I know he remembers.
A Cup of Coffee
Snow had started falling around dinnertime the day before. Big fat flakes, without a wind to disturb the soft edges of accumulation. Coming down in thick swirls, it alighted so gently and swiftly you would swear you could see it pile up. By mid-morning of the next day, eight or ten inches of new snow redefined the landscape. The sun came out, sparkling with an eye-piercing brilliance off the glittering white surface.
Delivering the mail that morning was like walking in loose sand. Icy granules of snow packed down underfoot, then slid out from beneath my boots, making each step a lung-busting challenge. By lunchtime I was exhausted. Breaking new trail is hard work, and I still had four or five hours of walking ahead of me. My pace slowed. Instead of simply struggling and pushing through it, however, I decided to try to admire the beauty of the wintry landscape.
All the classic winter snow scenes appeared: cedar fence rails and posts bearing a delicate mantle of snow; dark green boughs of pine and balsam weighed down under fresh white drifts, occasionally revealing the brilliant red flash of a cardinal. A small charcoal grill, neglected for the winter on a front stoop, became a rocket ship with its cone head capsule of snow. Other items lost their identities altogether, indiscriminate lumps under the thick white blanket.
At one point I spotted a strange imprint in the snow near a row of bushes. A large bird, perhaps a hawk or owl of some sort, had scooped up a morsel of food. Individual feathers from the tips of the raptor’s outstretched wings marked the snow. From the impressive length of the wingspan, and the depth of the feathered imprints, I deduced that he must have been struggling as hard as I was in the snow. I could almost feel his exertion as he tried to pull himself back aloft.
The harsh scraping of shovels on concrete broke the snow’s hush. Plodding along, I came upon a trio of snow shovelers near the far end of the block. I had never seen the workers before. They must have been hired to shovel, but that seemed odd, because all the usual snow-removal outfits used plows or snowblowers. An enterprising youngster might earn some extra cash shoveling for neighbors, but these three were adults. They wouldn’t make much profit clearing snow by hand. Their old pickup truck, a rusty, dented, road-salt-encrusted wreck, was parked near the corner.
Drawing near, I saw there were two men and a woman, all with the long, shiny black hair of Native Americans. One of the men appeared to be too old and overweight for the physical strain. He took short breaks between scoops to catch his breath. The way he leaned forward, using the shovel for support, betrayed his age and discomfort. Even though the temperature was below freezing, none of them wore hats or gloves, and the big man’s coat hung open. When he spotted me, I groaned and looked away.
I felt him coming up the sidewalk behind me as I put mail in the slot. When I turned around, he greeted me with a broad grin and a glint of humor in his eyes. “Aaniin niiji,” he said. “Hello, my friend.”
Heavy swaths of gray hair along his temples and deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes showed him to be even older than I had imagined. I resigned myself to the inevitable request I had been expecting. He surprised me by asking, “Hey, my friend, do you have an aspirin?”
If he was trying to make a living by shoveling snow, I had no doubt that he was in desperate need of aspirins. I looked at his companions, leaning on their shovels and watching for my response.
His expression was open and sincere. I wished I did have some aspirins to give him. But I had to reply, “Sorry, I don’t have any with me.”
If anything, the old man’s good-natured smile grew even larger. “Well,” he said, “it was worth a try.” He waved an arm across the neighborhood. “Walking through all this snow, I thought you might have some.”
His voice was soft but resonated with a depth of character. With that and his impressive size and bearing, he could have been a leader of men had he so chosen. Perhaps he was.
Showing no inclination to leave, he repositioned his hands over the top of the shovel handle. His partners resumed working, and I took a moment to look at them. The woman was of an indeterminate middle age, with a tough look about her, as though life hadn’t always been kind to her. The other fellow was much younger and looked downright mean. But then, anyone with a tattoo on his face looks intimidating to me. The three of them were just the most improbable looking crew for a job like this.
The old man drew a deep sigh. I thought about offering him a couple dollars to buy some aspirins, but he hadn’t actually asked for money, and I didn’t want to offend him. I was puzzled, however, as to how they happened to be here shoveling snow. They certainly weren’t from around here.
I turned to move on, wishing I had something encouraging to say to complement the old man’s friendly smile. The thought of all the miles I had yet to walk crossed my mind, and I said, “You know, even better than aspirins, I wish I had a good cup of hot coffee.”
Once again his smile burst forth, this time revealing the gaps of several missing teeth. “Ah, yes,” he commented, nodding thoughtfully. “A cup of strong coffee would be good.”
His soft but direct response emboldened me, and I asked, “So, what brings you out here? I mean, I know the couple that lives here—did they hire you to shovel?”
His response was swift and to the point, as if he’d anticipated the question. “We’re staying at a shelter downtown. That’s my wife there, and my son,” he added, nodding at the pair of shovelers. “When the snow came, the people at the shelter asked for volunteers to help dig out the old folks.” He turned his head toward his truck and pointed to it with his lips. “I drive that old pickup, so I said we’d go.”
He told me more, then, adding that they would soon be heading back up north. I assumed he meant to one of the Ojibwe reservations in northern Minnesota.
“It will soon be syruping time,” he said, smiling. “My son is the best at boiling down the sap. Even the others bring their sap to him to cook. He knows just when the sugar is best.”
The pride in his voice was obvious. I looked over at the tattooed face, but the young man kept working, even though I was sure he had heard his father’s words.
“Well, I have to keep moving,” I said. “Be careful working so hard. Don’t hurt yourself in all this snow.”
He laughed with his mouth wide open. “And I hope you find a cup of coffee!”
We parted ways then, him to his shoveling, and me to my route. I felt a little bad, though, about the way I had assumed he was looking for a handout. Whatever the facts were about his circumstances, he had been nothing but polite and friendly toward me, and he was doing what he could to help someone else. Right about now I wished there were several more shovelers just like him out there clearing off the sidewalks.
Most Minnesotans take a pragmatic approach to their snow shoveling—that is, to wait until the last flake is down to avoid working the job twice. Because this snowfall had continued into the late morning when most homeowners were off to work, I was left to tromp my own path through the yards.
With so many retired folks in the neighborhood, however, I knew the snowblowers would be out any time now. Wearing lined coveralls and heavy, felt-insulated boots, the elderly men are amazing to watch as they attack the drifts of snow. They clear off their own sidewalks and driveways, and most of the neighbors’, too. They blow snow out of the alleys and clear the curbs in front of their houses. Their wives finish the job with a broom on the steps and stoop. I sometimes think that many of the wives come out simply to keep an eye on the men. Even with a five-horsepower machine doing the heavy lifting, operating a snowblower in the cold air can be tough on an old heart.
When the sidewalks and driveways ar
e cleared, and all the neighbors are plowed out, the old men turn their snowblowers into the yards to open a narrow path for the letter carrier. Straight across the lawns they go, throwing massive arcs of snow, as well as branches, dead leaves, and clumps of sod. Each spring I encounter these same folks reseeding the lawns they destroy in the winter. On one of my blocks, the plowed pathway starts where I park my jeep and winds all the way to the far corner, connecting each house mailbox to mailbox. You can tell where one snowblower stops and another takes over by the various widths in the swaths they cut.
One year, when the snow was piled more than waist deep, crossing the lawn was like darting through the trenches in France in World War I. The neighborhood kids loved it, and, of course, so did I. I thanked one of the old-timers one day as he stood by his idling machine after clearing my path. The leather choppers on his hands vibrated and shook where they rested on the handlebars. His cheeks were bright red, his stocking cap stretched askew across his head, and his nose ran like an active four-year-old’s. “By the time you get all these clothes on,” he shouted, acknowledging my thanks, “and get the damn snowblower running, a fella might as well make it worth the effort.”
As if on cue, I heard a snowblower start up in the distance, and I rallied at the thought of walkways opening up soon. I
decided to take my lunch break to allow them time to clear some trail. The snow-shoveling trio had long since loaded up and left. By the time my break was over, the whine of two-stroke engines filled the air. I drove my jeep over to the next street and began my trudging all over again. At some point a routine is set, and the blocks and the miles slowly fall behind.
The noise from the machines sounded like the amplified drone of a beehive, even more annoying than the scraping of shovels on concrete. But the sound signaled the opening of my paths and much easier walking. I waved at a man across the street running a snowblower. He walked through a miniature blizzard as the mounds of snow blew twenty feet or more into the air.
At the corner, I looked up in surprise to see the old pickup truck angling along the street. Deep ruts in the snow pulled it one way and shoved it back another. Behind the wheel was the old Ojibwe man, and I spotted the woman sitting beside him pointing at me. The engine revved and roared as the rear tires dug for traction. Pulling over to the curb would be impossible, so he stopped the truck in the middle of the deserted street and rolled down his window.
I stepped off the curb into the unplowed roadway. The old man was laughing, and his wife giggled beside him. At the far side of the bench seat, the young man leaned forward. Did I detect a hint of a smile on his face? With the truck stopped, he passed something to the woman, who gave it to the driver.
“Aaniin niiji,” the old man called as he handed over a tall cup of steaming hot coffee. The heat from the cup radiated straight into my cold hands. The earthy aroma engulfed me. My pleasure must have been evident, because they burst out laughing again.
“I have aspirins, too,” he said, fumbling inside his coat.
“No, no. That’s okay,” I replied, holding up a hand. “This coffee is going to make my whole day.”
And with that, the engine revved, the truck slid sideways, and they floated off down the snow-covered street like a boat over a froth-filled stream. Their laughter quickly faded away against the background racket of snowblowers. The young man waved at me through the back window, and I raised the cup to him in a salute of thanks.
The Lonely Pines
A woman on my route took the time one day to show me some black-and-white photographs of her house, the house she grew up in. A photo dated 1926 showed her two-story stucco home standing alone on the corner of the block where there are now thirty houses. Massive pine trees covered the surrounding open area. I could make out the woman, as a little girl, standing on the front steps. The street was no more than a dirt track. The family mailbox perched precariously atop a fence post near the roadway, and, in the foreground, a discarded axle lay mired in the mud. She told me that they had a milk cow and chickens.
The next photograph was dated thirty years later. All the trees were gone except two towering white pines in her side yard. Houses lined both sides of the paved street. Near the front door of her house was a small garden plot that I recognized immediately, because every spring her perennial bulbs come up in jumbled masses in that patch. Early in April I start checking for daffodils and crocuses to burst through the remaining snow, announcing with their vibrant colors the coming of spring.
Now, comparing the photograph from the 1950s to her house, it was amazing to see the changes that had occurred in a mere forty years. The garden patch had doubled or tripled in size. I stood back to take a closer look, and for the first time realized the two big pine trees were gone. “When did you cut down the trees?” I asked.
“I didn’t.” She showed me the next photograph, from 1965. Both trees were broken off at least twenty feet up their trunks. “They’d become too tall and top heavy,” she informed me. “A big wind came through one night and knocked both of them down.” She paused for a moment and smiled wistfully. “I used to lie in bed on summer nights with the windows open to listen to the breeze in the pine boughs.”
“I bet that was nice,” I said. “Sort of like being up north at a cabin on a lake. It must have been sad when they came down.”
She nodded, then crossed her arms in front of her and held herself tight. Her gaze went up to where the virgin white pines had reached for the sky. “When my husband went off to war, he told me to listen for the wind in the trees. He said I’d hear his voice talking to me.”
This surprised me, because I hadn’t known she had been married. She turned her attention back to me when she sensed my confusion.
“We were married only a few months before he shipped out. I was pretty young,” she added with a self-conscious smile. She was tall and slender, and it wasn’t hard to picture her as a beautiful young lady.
“I know this sounds crazy; maybe I was just naïve and in love, but sometimes at night I really did hear his voice in the trees. He told me about his plans and ambitions. He spoke of the family we’d have, and how the house would be full of children. He told me he loved me.”
She slipped the photos into a pocket of her apron and looked out over her garden. “But I never saw him alive again. He died in the Pacific.”
I suddenly had to sit down on her steps. Her story had sapped the strength from my knees. Bending over to pull weeds from among her tulips, she continued, “Of course, like I said, it was probably all in my imagination. It may have been my own words I heard.” She told me about working her way through college and becoming a schoolteacher.
The intimacy of her tale emboldened me to ask, “But surely there were other men. You were so young, why didn’t you remarry?”
The eighty-year-old woman sat down next to me. She moved with a dignified grace, smooth and languid. “Oh, there were some other boys around, I suppose.” She slapped at my knee. “It wasn’t like I never got asked out on a date, or anything.”
I smiled and looked at her. A tear sat on her cheek. One slim drop, high up, perched just below her eye.
“But every night, you know, for twenty-some years, he’d come to me on the breeze in the pine trees. He remained faithful to me, how could I do otherwise?”
The loss of the trees took on a whole new meaning now. “I’m really sorry,” I said. We sat quietly for a while with our thoughts. She never had the chance to raise a family, or grow old with a mate. In a way I felt angry with her husband for not allowing her to move on. Now she was all alone in her old age.
“I hired a man to cut up the trees and haul them away,” she told me. “He said one of them had some rot, but the other one was totally solid. He figured the rotted one must have fallen and knocked the healthy one down.”
I nodded. At least the trees had had a long life together.
The tear had run down her cheek, chased by several more. With no family left, I wondered how many times she had told this story. It had the feeling of being the first.
“Just before dawn the wind died down. I didn’t dare move. I listened with all my might. Then, I heard it. Just a creaking at first.” Tears cascaded down her face. There were no sobs or sniffles, just a steady stream of tears.
“That old tree was dying,” she said, turning a grim face at me. “It wasn’t dying from rot, either. Soon the cracking got louder. When it finally fell, it landed on top of the other one. That’s how I knew it fell of its own accord.”
I didn’t know what to say, so we just sat there for a few minutes. Before I left, she said, “They went together. Can you imagine how lonely the sound of the wind in one tree would be?”
Oops
One gorgeous fall day I came upon a small construction crew working in the front yard of a house on my route. The house
itself was tiny. It sat way in the back of the lot, right at the
alley. It was so small that there wasn’t even a garage or an open place to park a vehicle. The owner drove a motorcycle for as much of the year as the weather would allow. He drove his Harley right through the front door and parked it on a sheet of plywood in the living room. When the snow came he holed up in his little house and tore the machine apart, rebuilding it and preparing for another summer of riding.
There wasn’t any snow in the forecast yet, but Labor Day had come and gone weeks earlier, so we were getting by on borrowed time. In Minnesota, Labor Day marks the unofficial end to summer. It’s a bittersweet time, because the State Fair runs through Labor Day, and while we look forward to spending a day at the fair, we know that when it’s over the days will be getting shorter. Deck furniture disappears into garages, perennial gardens are cut back and buried under mulch, and frost covers windshields and lawns in the early morning hours. But until winter actually hits, we get to experience some of the most beautiful days of the year.
Beware of Cat Page 9
