Good to Have My Arms

Older daughter back.  She woke me and my wife up at 3:00AM to say there was a bug in her bathroom.  Our bathroom was immediately behind her.  “Why don’t you just use ours?” I barked.  My wife asked what kind of bug.  “A stink bug.”  They are ugly enough but move like rhinoceros beetles and are rather easy to dispose of.  My wife bravely went off to reckon with this critter. 

I the morning she yelled downstairs for us to be quiet. It was 11:00AM.  I offered to make my younger one some breakfast but she helped herself to some goodies she’d secured the night before at the Japanese market we visited in Sunset Park.  She and my wife went out to do some shopping and she began to chop-away at some of the vast sheet of ice covering our driveway.   This immediately made me feel guilty.  Shoveling driveways was once my trade.  I’d been sitting in a chair imagining that I’d go for a walk to get some exercise.  I should head out and do something productive. 

The big shovel we have is plastic and not the right tool.  There is also a spade with a pointed tip which is what you need for digging into hard earth but in my wife’s hands was a flat shovel I hadn’t seen before, which is exactly what you need to have any hope of dislodging any of crust on our driveway.  So, as she sped off, up our extremely icy, driveway incline, I began to chop and chop. 

Slow going, but progress was made.  And, as I haven’t had access to a gym for a while it was both wonderful and humbling to call upon my upper body to perform.  I stayed out there for about two hours or more and my hands, my biceps, my shoulders all felt like silly-pudy.  I tried to chop as a lefty for a while to give my right hand a break.  Some places you could get the tip of the blade up under the ice and pry a long sheet free.  But most blocks you simply had to slam the blade down on over and over again, at this and that angle until pieces would come off.  Salt would have helped, so would the sun.  But we didn’t have any and I kept at it beyond what necessity demanded, because if felt so good to have my arms sore.   That’s how I sent the shortest day of the year, with the sun dropping down in horizon by 3:30PM, the way I remember from a winter visit to Oulu in Finland, near the Arctic Circle.

Saturday, 12/21/19