Shoveling snow safely

Shoveling snow. An activity that truly brings you up close and personal to Nature and all she wants to share with us, especially if you’re a baby boomer and it’s tough on your back.

Where I live now, there’s winter snow….dry, powdery, mercifully light on your arms and shoulders. A good thing especially when your driveway is sloped and your shoes don’t have the best traction.

And then there’s the spring snow…sometime during February or March, the snow becomes wetter and heavier. Everyone will tell you how great spring snow is because it doesn’t stay around long. The roads and grassy areas are warm and it melts quickly. Oh yippee.

But you’re still shoveling.

And shoveling. And shoveling.

Because around here, it can easily snow through May, which it did last year. Thick, wet and heavy, it was very unkind to trees and shrubs that foolishly had thought the coast was clear and already had begun to bloom. Not only was I outside with a rake, jabbing it upwards into trees trying to shake snow off struggling limbs (and getting most of the snow in my face), I was leaning out upstairs windows with broom handles jabbing at the tops of trees that were perilously leaning over.

All in all, it’s exhausting. And I know everyone living in the Northeast U.S. is well over it all.

Of course, they sell “ergonomic” snow shovels, which can be a blessing when your back is worn out from it all. Then there are the snow blowers, which your neighbor often owns, but this neighbor never seems to get outside to use it early enough so you still end up doing your driveway the old-fashioned way.

I remember my father shoveling what seemed to be endless snow when I was a child. No one on our street had any blowers and he probably wouldn’t have let them come over anyway. He was going to do it himself, without resting. Which looking back, wasn’t very smart health-wise.

As we get older it’s okay to do things in short spurts. It’s even more okay to let someone else do it for us. Kindness is a gift, not a statement of age. We’ve done enough of it to last a lifetime—let someone else have a turn. It’s not worth risking back injury, heart attack, or slipping on an icy surface.

Maybe that’s one of the big lessons of winter: putting our well-earned wisdom to work to take care of ourselves.

Maybe another lesson is sitting with ourselves and seeing if we can be quiet, inside, and still sane…even after the days go by. Not easy. I can get cabin fever quickly, which triggers food cravings far stranger than a healthy person could imagine. It’s all part of that don’t-fence-me-in thing: I’m okay being at home, until I am forced to be at home, then I want to be somewhere else.

Snowfall used to be so much fun when we were kids. It still is to my dog, (though the hair on her feet freezes and we have to dig ice balls from between her toes). I confess it’s lost its luster for me, especially if I have to drive in it. Still, it is often beautiful…especially the next day, (if you’re lucky enough to live where it usually doesn’t snow for days on-end), when it’s just on the tops of the hills, or tip-tops of far-away mountains, and the sky is a breathtaking shade of blue, and the sun makes the snowy ground dazzle like diamonds….

If you’re shoveling, be careful. Be wise. Be patient.

It’s gotta end sometime.