I used to think kindness was something people noticed.<\/p>\n
I was wrong about that.<\/p>\n
At least, I believed I was wrong for eleven years.<\/p>\n
My name is Maggie Fennimore.<\/p>\n
I was fifty-two years old, and I worked behind the register at a pharmacy in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
I knew what it meant to stand on my feet all day.<\/p>\n
I knew how to smile when I was tired.<\/p>\n
And I knew how to count every dollar before payday.<\/p>\n
But the hardest thing I ever did had nothing to do with my job.<\/p>\n
It involved a snow shovel.<\/p>\n
A driveway across the street.<\/p>\n
And a man who seemed to dislike everyone who lived near him.<\/p>\n
His name was Horace Pickett.<\/p>\n
Most people called him the Grinch.<\/p>\n
Not to his face, of course.<\/p>\n
At least, not when I was around.<\/p>\n
Eleven years earlier, my husband, Conrad, had died in a logging accident.<\/p>\n
He was forty-one.<\/p>\n
Even now, saying his age makes something inside me tighten.<\/p>\n
Forty-one.<\/p>\n
That was all he got.<\/p>\n
We had two children.<\/p>\n
One was eight, and the other was ten.<\/p>\n
They were still young enough to believe that grown-ups could fix almost anything.<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe that myself.<\/p>\n
But Conrad was gone, and there wasn't a thing I could do to bring him home.<\/p>\n
What remained was our house.<\/p>\n
Our children.<\/p>\n
And a mortgage that didn't care whether I was grieving.<\/p>\n
The bills kept arriving.<\/p>\n
My paycheck stayed the same.<\/p>\n
Every time I looked at the numbers, I felt the same fear.<\/p>\n
There wasn't enough.<\/p>\n
Not for everything.<\/p>\n
Not for long.<\/p>\n
That first winter, I barely recognized my own life.<\/p>\n
Conrad had always taken care of the heavy jobs around the house.<\/p>\n
He cleared the snow.<\/p>\n
He handled the things that needed fixing.<\/p>\n
He knew what to do when winter made everything difficult.<\/p>\n
And suddenly, all of it belonged to me.<\/p>\n
I didn't mind working hard.<\/p>\n
What hurt was being reminded, again and again, that he wasn't there.<\/p>\n
The first big snowstorm arrived that December.<\/p>\n
Two feet of snow covered our street.<\/p>\n
By five in the morning, I was already outside with a shovel.<\/p>\n
I needed to clear enough of the driveway to get to work.<\/p>\n
The street was quiet.<\/p>\n
Most of the houses were dark.<\/p>\n
I pushed the shovel into the snow, lifted what I could, and started again.<\/p>\n
It was heavier than I expected.<\/p>\n
My arms hurt.<\/p>\n
My back hurt.<\/p>\n
But that wasn't why I started crying.<\/p>\n
I remembered Conrad doing the same job.<\/p>\n
I remembered how ordinary it had seemed when he was alive.<\/p>\n
I hadn't known something so ordinary could become something I missed so much.<\/p>\n
I kept shoveling.<\/p>\n
There was no one else to do it.<\/p>\n
After a while, I stopped to catch my breath.<\/p>\n
That's when I looked across the street.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett was standing inside his doorway.<\/p>\n
He was eighty-one then.<\/p>\n
A retired railroad worker.<\/p>\n
A widower.<\/p>\n
He lived alone, and he seemed determined to keep the whole neighborhood at a distance.<\/p>\n
I'd seen him angry plenty of times.<\/p>\n
He shouted at children who crossed his grass.<\/p>\n
He complained when my trash cans stayed outside too long.<\/p>\n
He had even called the police about our dog barking.<\/p>\n
Twice.<\/p>\n
He didn't wave when we passed.<\/p>\n
He didn't smile.<\/p>\n
And he certainly hadn't shown much sympathy after Conrad died.<\/p>\n
I had no reason to believe he liked me.<\/p>\n
That morning, he was wearing a bathrobe.<\/p>\n
A shovel rested in his hands.<\/p>\n
His driveway was buried beneath the same heavy snow covering mine.<\/p>\n
He stood there looking at it.<\/p>\n
I watched him try to manage the shovel.<\/p>\n
It was more than he could comfortably handle.<\/p>\n
For a little while, he stayed in the doorway.<\/p>\n
Then he turned around.<\/p>\n
He went back inside.<\/p>\n
And the door closed.<\/p>\n
I stood in my driveway, holding my own shovel.<\/p>\n
I could have gone back to work.<\/p>\n
I could have told myself that his driveway wasn't my responsibility.<\/p>\n
I could have remembered every complaint he'd made about my family.<\/p>\n
All of those would have been reasonable choices.<\/p>\n
Instead, I looked at his closed door.<\/p>\n
Then at the snow.<\/p>\n
And I walked across the street.<\/p>\n
I didn't knock.<\/p>\n
I didn't ask permission.<\/p>\n
I simply started clearing his driveway.<\/p>\n
The snow was just as deep as it had been on my side of the road.<\/p>\n
Every shovelful took effort.<\/p>\n
I had already been working on my own driveway, and I was tired.<\/p>\n
But I kept going.<\/p>\n
I wasn't trying to make him like me.<\/p>\n
I didn't expect him to change.<\/p>\n
I wasn't even planning to tell him what I'd done.<\/p>\n
I just remembered how helpless I'd felt when Conrad died.<\/p>\n
And I had seen another person facing something he couldn't manage alone.<\/p>\n
That was enough.<\/p>\n
When the driveway was clear, I took my shovel home.<\/p>\n
The sun hadn't come up yet.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett's door stayed closed.<\/p>\n
I went to work without mentioning it to anyone.<\/p>\n
I thought that would be the end of it.<\/p>\n
One morning.<\/p>\n
One driveway.<\/p>\n
One small thing.<\/p>\n
Then another storm came.<\/p>\n
I woke before dawn and cleared my driveway.<\/p>\n
When I finished, I looked across the street.<\/p>\n
His was buried again.<\/p>\n
So I went over.<\/p>\n
I cleared it.<\/p>\n
And I came home.<\/p>\n
There was no conversation.<\/p>\n
No agreement.<\/p>\n
No promise to return.<\/p>\n
But when the next storm arrived, I found myself doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
After a while, it became part of winter.<\/p>\n
I cleared my snow.<\/p>\n
Then his.<\/p>\n
I went to work.<\/p>\n
And life continued.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett never thanked me.<\/p>\n
Not that first winter.<\/p>\n
Not the next.<\/p>\n
He still complained about things around the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
He still treated people as though they were bothering him just by being nearby.<\/p>\n
My children didn't suddenly become welcome on his lawn.<\/p>\n
My dog didn't suddenly become acceptable.<\/p>\n
Nothing about his manner softened.<\/p>\n
And I kept shoveling.<\/p>\n
I couldn't have explained it very well back then.<\/p>\n
Maybe part of me wanted to do something useful because there was so much I couldn't fix.<\/p>\n
I couldn't undo Conrad's accident.<\/p>\n
I couldn't make our family what it had been.<\/p>\n
I couldn't stop the bills.<\/p>\n
But I could clear a driveway.<\/p>\n
It was a small thing.<\/p>\n
And sometimes a small thing was all I had to give.<\/p>\n
I never asked Mr. Pickett to notice.<\/p>\n
For eleven winters, I let the snow disappear from his driveway without leaving my name behind.<\/p>\n
I thought I was keeping a secret.<\/p>\n
I had no idea how wrong I was.<\/p>\n
I used to think kindness was something people noticed. I was wrong about that. At least, I believed I was wrong for eleven years. My name is Maggie Fennimore. I … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41520,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41510\/revisions\/41520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}