As I went out to shovel snow AGAIN on Wednesday night, I noticed that my across the street neighbour was also shovelling her laneway. Judging by the haphazard parking of her car on the street, I assumed that she had come home from work, made it up our unplowed street, but gotten stuck or decided that she needed to shovel the lane before she attempted to drive in. As I was debating whether I should shovel my laneway or offer to help her, her son arrived to help her. I said hello, and we all went about our shovelling.

When they finished their shovelling, the son started to move the car. Since mom had driven past her house, he needed to turn the car around. I tried to motion for him to pull into my mostly cleared driveway, but he didn’t see me and chose a neighbour’s. Where he got stuck. I wandered over, and the first words out of his mouth were “maybe now would be a good time for her to get effing snow tires”. I laughed, and said that I had thought that very thing the first time that I had pushed her into her driveway this winter. It was snarky and I didn’t really mean it to be, but I had thought that, and this was the third time that I had pushed her out of the snow. Thankfully he laughed.

The neighbour whose laneway they were stuck in is away on a house swap, but their “tenant” came out and got treated to a special Canadian winter tradition when he helped us push. Once the car was safely parked in the correct laneway, we walked away and I thanked the visitor for his help. It was then that I realized that I shouldn’t be the one thanking him, and that I hadn’t been thanked either. Not this time, or either of the previous times. I was irked for a brief moment, but quickly concluded that it didn’t matter, I would have helped regardless.

Thursday morning, I awakened to watch the plow drive by and dump a wet sloppy mess in my laneway. I groaned, but Willy is away, so I had to get the lils out the door and worry about the snow later. Lunches got made, breakfast was fed, hair brushed, and snowsuits donned when I opened the door to see that the plow dump had been cleared. Not by a snowplow operator or someone with a snowblower, but by hand. I was stumped as to who had done it, until one of my neighbours let me know that it was the son. That is more than enough thanks for me!