There were mornings when I wanted to stop.<\/p>\n
I should admit that.<\/p>\n
People like to talk about helping others as though it's always easy.<\/p>\n
As though kindness makes you feel good every time.<\/p>\n
It doesn't.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you do something generous, and the person you help gives you another reason to regret it.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett was good at that.<\/p>\n
He remained the same difficult man I'd known before that first snowstorm.<\/p>\n
He had an opinion about everything.<\/p>\n
Children walking on his grass.<\/p>\n
Trash cans near the street.<\/p>\n
Dogs making noise.<\/p>\n
He noticed all of it.<\/p>\n
And when he disliked something, he made sure other people heard about it.<\/p>\n
My children were never allowed to forget his temper.<\/p>\n
I tried to teach them not to take it personally.<\/p>\n
But there were days when that was difficult.<\/p>\n
I knew what it felt like to be judged by a man who barely knew us.<\/p>\n
And I knew what it felt like to stand across the street before sunrise, doing him a favor he had never requested.<\/p>\n
Those two things didn't fit together very neatly.<\/p>\n
Still, winter came every year.<\/p>\n
And I went back.<\/p>\n
Snow would pile up overnight.<\/p>\n
The alarm would get me out of bed before work.<\/p>\n
I'd put on my coat, take the shovel, and begin with our driveway.<\/p>\n
Then I'd cross the street.<\/p>\n
I didn't always feel cheerful.<\/p>\n
Some mornings I was frustrated.<\/p>\n
Some mornings I was exhausted.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I thought about what Conrad would have said.<\/p>\n
He had known how to handle winter.<\/p>\n
He had been the one I depended on.<\/p>\n
Now I was doing the work for two houses.<\/p>\n
One belonged to the family I was trying to keep together.<\/p>\n
The other belonged to a man who rarely had a pleasant word for anyone.<\/p>\n
I didn't tell myself I was doing something remarkable.<\/p>\n
It was snow.<\/p>\n
Someone needed to move it.<\/p>\n
And I could still manage a shovel.<\/p>\n
That was how I thought about it.<\/p>\n
The years passed.<\/p>\n
My children grew older.<\/p>\n
I continued working at the pharmacy.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett grew older too.<\/p>\n
His steps slowed.<\/p>\n
The distance between his front door and the end of his driveway seemed harder for him to manage.<\/p>\n
I didn't know much about his private life.<\/p>\n
I knew he had worked for the railroad.<\/p>\n
I knew his wife had died.<\/p>\n
I knew he lived alone.<\/p>\n
And I knew that whatever had made him so angry with the world hadn't improved with age.<\/p>\n
One neighborhood meeting stayed with me.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett was complaining about things on our street.<\/p>\n
At one point, he referred to me as the neighbor with the noisy little dog.<\/p>\n
He didn't even use my name.<\/p>\n
I sat there listening.<\/p>\n
I could have told everyone what I did for him each winter.<\/p>\n
I could have reminded him that he hadn't needed to clear his own driveway for years.<\/p>\n
I could have embarrassed him.<\/p>\n
I didn't.<\/p>\n
Part of that was stubbornness.<\/p>\n
I'd started helping him without expecting anything in return.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to turn the favor into something I could hold over his head.<\/p>\n
But another part of me was hurt.<\/p>\n
I won't pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n
It would have been nice to hear one decent word.<\/p>\n
Just one.<\/p>\n
I went home from that meeting feeling foolish.<\/p>\n
I remember thinking that perhaps I'd been wasting my time.<\/p>\n
Then winter returned.<\/p>\n
And when the next heavy snow came, I was back across the street before sunrise.<\/p>\n
There was no grand reason.<\/p>\n
I just couldn't look at that buried driveway and leave an elderly man to deal with it alone.<\/p>\n
The habit had become stronger than my irritation.<\/p>\n
So I continued.<\/p>\n
For years, Mr. Pickett and I lived almost entirely separate lives.<\/p>\n
We were close enough to see each other's houses from our windows.<\/p>\n
Yet we barely spoke.<\/p>\n
He had no idea what was happening inside my heart.<\/p>\n
At least, that was what I believed.<\/p>\n
And I had no idea what he carried around inside his.<\/p>\n
We saw the unpleasant parts of each other.<\/p>\n
I saw his complaints and his scowl.<\/p>\n
He saw my children, my dog, and whatever else bothered him about our household.<\/p>\n
There didn't seem to be anything more to the relationship.<\/p>\n
Then, two winters before his death, we had an ice storm.<\/p>\n
The kind that leaves everything looking ordinary until you try to walk on it.<\/p>\n
I got up early as usual.<\/p>\n
It was around five in the morning.<\/p>\n
I had work to think about, and the ice had made the neighborhood dangerous.<\/p>\n
I went outside.<\/p>\n
The cold was sharp.<\/p>\n
The ground was slippery.<\/p>\n
Across the street, Mr. Pickett's porch light was burning.<\/p>\n
That caught my attention.<\/p>\n
Then I noticed his front door.<\/p>\n
It was open.<\/p>\n
I stopped.<\/p>\n
For years, I'd seen that door closed whenever I came over to clear snow.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I'd seen him standing there.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I hadn't seen him at all.<\/p>\n
But an open front door at five in the morning was different.<\/p>\n
I looked toward the steps.<\/p>\n
At first, I couldn't understand what I was seeing.<\/p>\n
Something dark lay near the bottom.<\/p>\n
Then I recognized a person.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pickett.<\/p>\n
He was on the ice beneath his front steps.<\/p>\n
I dropped what I was doing and hurried toward him as carefully as I could.<\/p>\n
When I got close, I saw his face.<\/p>\n
His lips had turned blue.<\/p>\n
He wasn't getting up.<\/p>\n
He wasn't shouting.<\/p>\n
He wasn't complaining.<\/p>\n
The man who always seemed to have something angry to say was lying there in the cold, terribly still.<\/p>\n
I called emergency services.<\/p>\n
I told them where we were.<\/p>\n
Then I got down beside him.<\/p>\n
The ice was freezing.<\/p>\n
I took off my coat and wrapped it around him.<\/p>\n
I stayed next to him while we waited.<\/p>\n
I didn't know how long he'd been outside.<\/p>\n
I didn't know how badly he was hurt.<\/p>\n
I only knew that leaving him there alone wasn't an option.<\/p>\n
For the first time in all those winters, I wasn't trying to clear a path for Mr. Pickett.<\/p>\n
I was trying to keep him alive.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/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-41511","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\/41511","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=41511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41521,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41511\/revisions\/41521"}],"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=41511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}