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 was fifty-two years old, and I worked behind the register at a pharmacy in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
I knew what it meant to stand on my feet all day.
I knew how to smile when I was tired.
And I knew how to count every dollar before payday.
But the hardest thing I ever did had nothing to do with my job.
It involved a snow shovel.
A driveway across the street.
And a man who seemed to dislike everyone who lived near him.
His name was Horace Pickett.
Most people called him the Grinch.
Not to his face, of course.
At least, not when I was around.
Eleven years earlier, my husband, Conrad, had died in a logging accident.
He was forty-one.
Even now, saying his age makes something inside me tighten.
Forty-one.
That was all he got.
We had two children.
One was eight, and the other was ten.
They were still young enough to believe that grown-ups could fix almost anything.
I wanted to believe that myself.
But Conrad was gone, and there wasn't a thing I could do to bring him home.
What remained was our house.
Our children.
And a mortgage that didn't care whether I was grieving.
The bills kept arriving.
My paycheck stayed the same.
Every time I looked at the numbers, I felt the same fear.
There wasn't enough.
Not for everything.
Not for long.
That first winter, I barely recognized my own life.
Conrad had always taken care of the heavy jobs around the house.
He cleared the snow.
He handled the things that needed fixing.
He knew what to do when winter made everything difficult.
And suddenly, all of it belonged to me.
I didn't mind working hard.
What hurt was being reminded, again and again, that he wasn't there.
The first big snowstorm arrived that December.
Two feet of snow covered our street.
By five in the morning, I was already outside with a shovel.
I needed to clear enough of the driveway to get to work.
The street was quiet.
Most of the houses were dark.
I pushed the shovel into the snow, lifted what I could, and started again.
It was heavier than I expected.
My arms hurt.
My back hurt.
But that wasn't why I started crying.
I remembered Conrad doing the same job.
I remembered how ordinary it had seemed when he was alive.
I hadn't known something so ordinary could become something I missed so much.
I kept shoveling.
There was no one else to do it.
After a while, I stopped to catch my breath.
That's when I looked across the street.
Mr. Pickett was standing inside his doorway.
He was eighty-one then.
A retired railroad worker.
A widower.
He lived alone, and he seemed determined to keep the whole neighborhood at a distance.
I'd seen him angry plenty of times.
He shouted at children who crossed his grass.
He complained when my trash cans stayed outside too long.
He had even called the police about our dog barking.
Twice.
He didn't wave when we passed.
He didn't smile.
And he certainly hadn't shown much sympathy after Conrad died.
I had no reason to believe he liked me.
That morning, he was wearing a bathrobe.
A shovel rested in his hands.
His driveway was buried beneath the same heavy snow covering mine.
He stood there looking at it.
I watched him try to manage the shovel.
It was more than he could comfortably handle.
For a little while, he stayed in the doorway.
Then he turned around.
He went back inside.
And the door closed.
I stood in my driveway, holding my own shovel.
I could have gone back to work.
I could have told myself that his driveway wasn't my responsibility.
I could have remembered every complaint he'd made about my family.
All of those would have been reasonable choices.
Instead, I looked at his closed door.
Then at the snow.
And I walked across the street.
I didn't knock.
I didn't ask permission.
I simply started clearing his driveway.
The snow was just as deep as it had been on my side of the road.
Every shovelful took effort.
I had already been working on my own driveway, and I was tired.
But I kept going.
I wasn't trying to make him like me.
I didn't expect him to change.
I wasn't even planning to tell him what I'd done.
I just remembered how helpless I'd felt when Conrad died.
And I had seen another person facing something he couldn't manage alone.
That was enough.
When the driveway was clear, I took my shovel home.
The sun hadn't come up yet.
Mr. Pickett's door stayed closed.
I went to work without mentioning it to anyone.
I thought that would be the end of it.
One morning.
One driveway.
One small thing.
Then another storm came.
I woke before dawn and cleared my driveway.
When I finished, I looked across the street.
His was buried again.
So I went over.
I cleared it.
And I came home.
There was no conversation.
No agreement.
No promise to return.
But when the next storm arrived, I found myself doing the same thing.
After a while, it became part of winter.
I cleared my snow.
Then his.
I went to work.
And life continued.
Mr. Pickett never thanked me.
Not that first winter.
Not the next.
He still complained about things around the neighborhood.
He still treated people as though they were bothering him just by being nearby.
My children didn't suddenly become welcome on his lawn.
My dog didn't suddenly become acceptable.
Nothing about his manner softened.
And I kept shoveling.
I couldn't have explained it very well back then.
Maybe part of me wanted to do something useful because there was so much I couldn't fix.
I couldn't undo Conrad's accident.
I couldn't make our family what it had been.
I couldn't stop the bills.
But I could clear a driveway.
It was a small thing.
And sometimes a small thing was all I had to give.
I never asked Mr. Pickett to notice.
For eleven winters, I let the snow disappear from his driveway without leaving my name behind.
I thought I was keeping a secret.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: The Neighbor Who Called the Police on My Dog Never Thanked Me, but I Continued Helping Him Through Every Wisconsin Winter
For Eleven Winters I Cleared the Driveway of a Man Who Hated My Family Without Ever Knowing Why I Kept Going Back
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