There were mornings when I wanted to stop.
I should admit that.
People like to talk about helping others as though it's always easy.
As though kindness makes you feel good every time.
It doesn't.
Sometimes you do something generous, and the person you help gives you another reason to regret it.
Mr. Pickett was good at that.
He remained the same difficult man I'd known before that first snowstorm.
He had an opinion about everything.
Children walking on his grass.
Trash cans near the street.
Dogs making noise.
He noticed all of it.
And when he disliked something, he made sure other people heard about it.
My children were never allowed to forget his temper.
I tried to teach them not to take it personally.
But there were days when that was difficult.
I knew what it felt like to be judged by a man who barely knew us.
And I knew what it felt like to stand across the street before sunrise, doing him a favor he had never requested.
Those two things didn't fit together very neatly.
Still, winter came every year.
And I went back.
Snow would pile up overnight.
The alarm would get me out of bed before work.
I'd put on my coat, take the shovel, and begin with our driveway.
Then I'd cross the street.
I didn't always feel cheerful.
Some mornings I was frustrated.
Some mornings I was exhausted.
Sometimes I thought about what Conrad would have said.
He had known how to handle winter.
He had been the one I depended on.
Now I was doing the work for two houses.
One belonged to the family I was trying to keep together.
The other belonged to a man who rarely had a pleasant word for anyone.
I didn't tell myself I was doing something remarkable.
It was snow.
Someone needed to move it.
And I could still manage a shovel.
That was how I thought about it.
The years passed.
My children grew older.
I continued working at the pharmacy.
Mr. Pickett grew older too.
His steps slowed.
The distance between his front door and the end of his driveway seemed harder for him to manage.
I didn't know much about his private life.
I knew he had worked for the railroad.
I knew his wife had died.
I knew he lived alone.
And I knew that whatever had made him so angry with the world hadn't improved with age.
One neighborhood meeting stayed with me.
Mr. Pickett was complaining about things on our street.
At one point, he referred to me as the neighbor with the noisy little dog.
He didn't even use my name.
I sat there listening.
I could have told everyone what I did for him each winter.
I could have reminded him that he hadn't needed to clear his own driveway for years.
I could have embarrassed him.
I didn't.
Part of that was stubbornness.
I'd started helping him without expecting anything in return.
I didn't want to turn the favor into something I could hold over his head.
But another part of me was hurt.
I won't pretend otherwise.
It would have been nice to hear one decent word.
Just one.
I went home from that meeting feeling foolish.
I remember thinking that perhaps I'd been wasting my time.
Then winter returned.
And when the next heavy snow came, I was back across the street before sunrise.
There was no grand reason.
I just couldn't look at that buried driveway and leave an elderly man to deal with it alone.
The habit had become stronger than my irritation.
So I continued.
For years, Mr. Pickett and I lived almost entirely separate lives.
We were close enough to see each other's houses from our windows.
Yet we barely spoke.
He had no idea what was happening inside my heart.
At least, that was what I believed.
And I had no idea what he carried around inside his.
We saw the unpleasant parts of each other.
I saw his complaints and his scowl.
He saw my children, my dog, and whatever else bothered him about our household.
There didn't seem to be anything more to the relationship.
Then, two winters before his death, we had an ice storm.
The kind that leaves everything looking ordinary until you try to walk on it.
I got up early as usual.
It was around five in the morning.
I had work to think about, and the ice had made the neighborhood dangerous.
I went outside.
The cold was sharp.
The ground was slippery.
Across the street, Mr. Pickett's porch light was burning.
That caught my attention.
Then I noticed his front door.
It was open.
I stopped.
For years, I'd seen that door closed whenever I came over to clear snow.
Sometimes I'd seen him standing there.
Sometimes I hadn't seen him at all.
But an open front door at five in the morning was different.
I looked toward the steps.
At first, I couldn't understand what I was seeing.
Something dark lay near the bottom.
Then I recognized a person.
Mr. Pickett.
He was on the ice beneath his front steps.
I dropped what I was doing and hurried toward him as carefully as I could.
When I got close, I saw his face.
His lips had turned blue.
He wasn't getting up.
He wasn't shouting.
He wasn't complaining.
The man who always seemed to have something angry to say was lying there in the cold, terribly still.
I called emergency services.
I told them where we were.
Then I got down beside him.
The ice was freezing.
I took off my coat and wrapped it around him.
I stayed next to him while we waited.
I didn't know how long he'd been outside.
I didn't know how badly he was hurt.
I only knew that leaving him there alone wasn't an option.
For the first time in all those winters, I wasn't trying to clear a path for Mr. Pickett.
I was trying to keep him alive.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: I Found Him Freezing Outside His House Before Sunrise, and What Happened After the Ambulance Came Changed Our Quiet Routine Forever
For Eleven Winters I Cleared the Driveway of a Man Who Hated My Family Without Ever Knowing Why I Kept Going Back
Part 2 of 10
