The Second Shovel

Forty centimetres overnight, and the plow came at four and put half of it back across the bottom of my driveway in a wall with the consistency of a countertop.

I'm most of the way down one side when the guy from two doors down comes out with a second shovel. Four years we've lived here and said nothing.

"They only plow in summer," he says.

We work from opposite ends. He's better at it — he goes in at an angle and takes less each time, and he's still ahead of me at the halfway point.

His gloves are gone through at the fingertips. My mitts are men's and they aren't mine and they still smell faintly like the guy they belonged to, in the wool.

It takes fifty minutes.

After, in my kitchen, which I have not cleaned, he drinks bad coffee and tells me he plays trumpet, or played, that the gigs went in 2020 and came back at half and then stopped coming back. He does session work when there's session work.

I tell him I cry at the lobster tank at the IGA. I don't know why I tell him this.

He says he's never once looked at the lobster tank.

He puts the mug in the sink, which is a thing you have to have been raised to do.

It's still coming down. By morning there's a new inch on everything and you can't tell anyone was out here.