JANUARY 27, 2023 – Last night I risked life and limb to take the garbage and recycling down our 50-foot-long driveway to the alley receptacles. Winter’s been hard on the big, hard-plastic bins. Smacked several times by the plow, they stand at odd angles, in rough cut-outs of the snowbanks along our rutted, ever-narrowing, nearly impassable alleyway. If the bins were people, they’d be poor, hapless, destitute, disparaged, despairing, shivering, forgotten, miserable characters in a Charles Dickens novel, evoking great sympathy in the heart of the reader.
Because of treacherous conditions between the back of our house and those forlorn characters, I hadn’t walked the distance in over a week. With garbage and recycling pickups scheduled for early this morning, before climbing into bed last night, I had to drag a week’s worth of consumption remains into the night.
I went “full gear”: running shoes, an old parka, a wool cap, and wool-lined “chopper” mittens—not to protect against the “cold” (at 19F, fairly mild) but to cushion the blow if I should slip and fall. Once I had everything in position, I pulled the first item—a garbage bag—through the porch and down the icy, snow-covered driveway to the alley bins. To any neighbor witnesses I was an aged penguin. I didn’t care. Undergoing a year of “extreme” medical care had taught me a lot about the vanity of . . . vanity.
Once I’d reached the end of the driveway, I confronted a mini-Grand Canyon encased in ice wrapped in a banana peel. Immutable laws of physics-in-winter were instantly instinctive, codified as follows:
- Footwear friction is inversely proportionate to surface ice.
- Gravity x 1/footwear friction = velocity.
- Mass x velocity = bad.
With these laws in force, I searched for two small patches of compacted snow (first choice) or roughed up ice (backup plan)—one for each foot. The gods delivered. God knows what bribes had changed hands on snowy Olympus. I then tried to lift the cover of the tilted garbage bin, but it was frozen stuck. A quick downward punch with my fist shattered winter’s grip. In went the garbage bag.
I repeated the maneuver twice more with the recycling. On my final penguin walk up the driveway to the safety of the porch, I relaxed enough to grip, so to speak, the fact I hadn’t shoveled/blown the last two dustings of snow. I could attest, however, from my daily walks to and from “Little Switzerland,” that few others in the neighborhood this week had obeyed the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt keep they sidewalk clear of ice and snow”—set in stone among our local ordinances. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll “obey.”
This morning the neighborhood awoke to a new layer of snow. At 8:30 Josh across the street was out shoveling his walks. An hour later, his pious next door neighbor, Bill, was obeying as well. At 10:30, I was out the door, bound for “Little Switzerland.” I discovered, however, that down our side of the street, nearly everyone had obeyed the Eleventh Commandment. Next door, Lynn had also complied with the Extra Credit Commandment, sculpted in snow, if not stone: “If thou art the first to shovel, clear the snow at least 10 feet beyond thy property line—both sides of thy lot.”
I proceeded to shovel. No one should want to slip from favor in this warm and friendly neighborhood, especially in the dead of winter.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
