We both stood there, looking out the picture window in disbelief. It was like looking at one of those old-fashioned Christmas cards. Except for a thin slice of Chris's car and the bare tree limbs, everything outside the window was white. The snow was still falling heavily, and the overall effect was so bright it hurt my eyes to look at it.

"Man!" Chris exclaimed. "We'll never get out of here."

"Yeah." I agreed. It didn't look promising. We turned in unison and looked out the back windows, just as the winter equivalent of a dust devil roiled the snow in a circular funnel. The town on the other side of the river was hidden from view by a dense white curtain.

I thought about my mom, stuck in her house, on her own until the roads were plowed so that her aide could get there. It wouldn't be today. That meant I had to go, no matter how difficult getting out of the house appeared. I opened the closet, pulled out my parka and boots and began taking off my shoes.

"You're *not* going out there, are you?" Chris asked, looking at me like I was nuts.

"The longer we wait to start the harder it's going to be," I sighed. I hated being the grown-up, but one of us had to be. I pulled on my boots, wrapped a scarf around my neck, pulled on my parka, gloves and hat. I'd thought ahead enough to leave the shovel outside the front door, so at least I wouldn't have to contend with boots full of the white chillies.

Chris is impervious to guilt. He kissed me and returned to his nest in the library. Whatever I was going to do, I was going to do it alone.

I opened the door and stepped outside. As if on cue, the wind whipped the snow off the roof and down on my head in copious quantities. So it was going to be one of *those* days.

It took me better than twenty minutes to clear off the twenty foot walk from the front door to the driveway. When I reached the end, I turned around and saw that the path I'd so laboriously cleared was beginning to fill in again with drifting snow.

My landlord John was snowblowing his driveway next door. He uses some sort of attachment on his lawn tractor which ordinarily makes quick work of any snow storm, but the snow was so deep he was having difficulty. I knew he'd be coming my way soon, so I concentrated on the sidewalk and then went to face the rear patio.

The first shovelful I hoisted blew back in my face with a ferocity that made my skin sting. I knew when I was beaten. The patio would have to wait until the wind died down. When I turned the corner to walk back into the house, I stopped dead in my tracks. It was almost impossible to tell where the walk was.

I shoveled my way back into the house and took off my boots and coat. I grabbed a soda from the refrigerator and sat down at the dining room table, watching the snow stream off the roof. Wasn't this what I'd hoped for? A day off?

But for some reason, I didn't feel joyous. What would I do with it? Would I squander it the way I did my Saturdays? There was laundry to be done, stories to send out to potential publishers, all manner of useful things to be done. But I couldn't move. I was fascinated by the dance of the snow, all of the energy being expended right outside the window.

The cats dozed on the radiators, and I heard Chris's keyboard clack away. He came out of the library a little while later and said that John was outside to snowblow our driveway. He had on a goofy pair of mint green cross-country ski pants, a leather jacket and one of those ski hats with the earflaps and the long tassel down the back. I began laughing and couldn't stop.

Chris gave me a dirty look and went outside. I dried my eyes and went to the front hall to suit up for the outdoors. I could hear John's snowblower, but it seemed far away. The wind was much louder. Chris had slogged his way through the blown in walkway, apparently thinking it was still too early to shovel. Or at least that's what I preferred to think.

But I am a stubborn woman. As Chris cleaned his car and John repeatedly stabbed at the three-foot pile of snow that the plow had deposited at the end of our driveway, I attacked the walk anew. I had it cleared before either of the men had accomplished their tasks, and feeling a little thrill of accomplishment, I quickly set to work on cleaning off my Jeep.

Half an hour later, John was on his way back to his house and Chris and I had returned our cars to the driveway. He asked me if I wanted his help shoveling, but after looking back to see the front path once again blown in, I conceded defeat. "Never mind," I told him. "We'll get it when the storm dies down."

We went back inside, fighting for space on the rug just inside the front door, then made a pot of coffee and sat on the sofa in the living room, just listening to the sound of the snow blowing against the windows. I thought about all of the things I should be doing and sighed.

Chris started softly singing -- if you could call it that -- the Who song "Teenage Wasteland," but substituting the word "frozen" for "teenage." Getting into it, he stood up and walked to the kitchen doing Pete Townshend windmills with his air guitar. When he returned, he had a bag of cookies in his hand.

"C'mon, carb up," he urged. "We're going to need it to get all of this snow shoveled." I looked at him in surprise, and he affected an exaggerated look of innocence. "What?" he asked. "Did you really think I'd make you do all of the shoveling yourself?"

Sometimes I just love that guy.

Props to the CHPercolator List for the prompt
March 6, 2001
1045 words