Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [50]
A birthday party for a one-year-old is never for the one-year-old. Clara was oblivious to both the festivity and the domestic angst. The party was for my parents and for me. I had not outgrown the need to be near the present that was being opened, to rip the paper myself in a kind of vicarious frenzy. Clara, immune to the excitement, had so exhausted herself with her fretting that she fell asleep as we sang “Happy Birthday” to her. My mother, reluctant to wake a cranky baby, said we should all carry on without her, an idea I approved of. Most of the photographs taken that day show Clara asleep, a cone-shaped hat on her head, her mouth parted, her nose running. I, in purple leggings and a My Little Pony T-shirt, look anxious and demanding, making sure I get my due. My mother, who that night admitted to having a toothache that later required a root canal, has frown lines between her brows. And in a picture taken by my mother long after all the guests had left, my father is asleep on the couch, crumpled paper wrapping like a small sea around his boat, Clara prone on his chest. In the photograph you can hear him snoring.
I am true to my word. While my father is on the telephone to my grandmother, sorting out her travel arrangements to Lebanon (all her flights have been delayed or canceled), I bundle up in my parka, snow pants, hat, and ski gloves and set out to clear the path to the woodshed for my father. My grandmother’s trip will be a heroic one for a seventy-three-year-old woman, requiring driving herself to the Indianapolis airport, taking a flight from there to Newark, boarding another flight to Boston, waiting for a third flight to Lebanon on a ten-seater plane most twenty-year-olds wouldn’t get on, and then being driven in my father’s truck to Shepherd. Typically the trip will take her, door-to-door, eight hours. She swears that it’s worth it, but I have an idea that soon she won’t be able to make the journey, and that we’ll have to go to Indianapolis instead, a prospect I am looking forward to. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the prospect of three plane flights in one day seems like heaven.
The snow has turned to swirls of fine icy crystals that sting my face if I don’t keep my head lowered. The snow has covered the grasses and the small brush; it spreads in all directions with only the trees to break the panorama. Every pine bough and birch limb is covered with white, as is the woodshed that is my goal. Bushes make humpy shapes, and the forest has lost the spindly scratchiness of early winter. We are socked in. I think of the people who lived in the house when it was built in the late nineteenth century, when there was no town plow to make driveways and roads passable. And of the natives who lived on the land before there were any houses at all, who literally had to dig themselves up through the snow just to reach the air.
The sky seems to be clearing, and I guess that the thin snow shower is a sign of the end of the nor’easter. When the sun comes out, this same landscape will be blinding. Paralleling the drive up to the house is an open field that is long enough to make a sledding hill. Only when we’ve had a good snowfall, though, can I get a decent run without being slowed down by the tops of the brush. Sometimes I can talk my dad into getting out the round aluminum saucers we use for sleds and helping me pack the snow with a couple of runs himself.
I discover, as I make a few test digs, that the snow is heavy. The temperature is rising and the snow is packing itself. It could take over an hour just to reach the woodshed, and I am beginning to regret my generosity. I hope that when my father gets off the phone with the airlines, he’ll take pity and give me a hand.
I start shoveling in earnest and begin to sweat almost immediately. It takes a tremendous effort to lift a shovelful of snow high enough