For this month and the last one, we own two houses in Vermilion. We are downsizing from our current 4-bedrooms-are-empty-why-are-we-still-cleaning-them house to a much more manageable 4-bedrooms-still-are empty-but-one’s-an-office-and-one’s-a-closet-so-not-really-as-bad. And we are losing a whole floor, so there’s that.

With said early acquisition of the new house – for purposes of painting and re-carpeting BEFORE we move in – there’s an extra two month burden of mortgage payments, taxes, utilities – but we went into that part knowingly.

But maybe I forgot about the snow.

Yes, with two houses, there’s two driveways. Granted, the downsized house has just a teeny-tiny driveway compared to the old house. But it also has a sidewalk that must be shovelled or else People Get Mad and you become A Bad Neighbor and A Lousy Citizen. (Also, I learned this week, that dog-owners don’t retrieve their dog’s poop from deeply snowy sidewalks because it just disappears down into the snow and freezes to the sidewalk, irretrievable and undetectable, until my snow shovel hits it and I nearly go end-over-end like hitting my brakes too hard on a bike. That stuff sticks.)

If it was summer, we would have two lawns to mow. But grass grows in a rather predictable fashion and usually one budgets once a week to keep the blades at bay.

Snow is a much more arbitrary foe.

Granted my new driveway is teeny-tiny. The first couple skiffs of snow were easily managed in record time. But a small driveway makes no difference when Canada decides to bless us with frozen moisture. It can PILE UP. And so I find myself getting a workout of workouts when I let it do just that.

There’s really no getting around it. Like dirty dishes or laundry, sooner or later, chores have to be dealt with or else you commit to living in a pigsty or getting stuck in your own driveway. It’s one of those “life things” and having a good attitude about it just feels better than crabbing about it. But if I do descend into the woe-is-me’s, I try to remember my mom.

A few years ago, Mom moved from farm to town and she, too, had a driveway that she needed to keep clean for the above-said reasons. And the winter after she moved in was a snowy one. Never one to shirk work, that winter, however, Mom wasn’t able to get out to shovel the snow. A couple of carpal-tunnel surgeries and the worst flu she ever succumbed to kept her in the house. We kids and grandkids would all take our turns cleaning her very long driveway.

One day I sent Tim over to Baba’s house to do the job. He told me later that for the entire time, she presided at the window, vicariously shovelling snow with him. When Tim went in after for the usual Baba-mandated-snack, she told him a story about how her neighbor across the street threw a bag of garbage in his bin every day. Amazed, she asked Tim, “Who has that much garbage?”

She had become a watcher. But she didn’t like it. She would have given anything to go out and shovel her own snow and be otherwise too busy to notice the neighbor’s garbage idiosyncrasies.

And so I think about Mom when I shovel snow. I try to be thankful for what I can still do because someday it might be taken away from me. I try to see snow and work as a blessing and not a necessary evil. And I even try not to go too fast.

Because trust me: that frozen dog poop will kill you.