Reflections on My Snow-Shoveling Career

Last week I shoveled our driveway and walks three times in one week. Kansas City’s winter hasn’t been as bad as in some places, but it’s been worse than we’ve had in several years. As my husband said after the third storm in a week, “This is like winter used to be.”

Well, it’s not like my winters used to be. During my childhood in Richland, Washington, we didn’t get as much snow as Kansas City gets. We had some storms, and I recall shoveling snow on occasion as a teenager. But I only did it when my dad made me, which wasn’t often.

During my college years in Middlebury, Vermont, we dealt with a lot of snow, and I had to slog through it on foot. But I had no shoveling responsibilities.

Stanford, California, only had a trace of snow once or twice in the three years I lived there. I rarely even wore a heavy coat.

Since 1979, I’ve lived in Kansas City, where snowstorms hit every winter, but vary widely in number and intensity. There have been years when we didn’t see our lawn for six weeks or more. (This month seems to have approached that, though my aching muscles are probably causing me to exaggerate.). There have been winters where we only shoveled token amounts.

For the past three winters, Kansas City snowfall has been less than 8 inches each season. But in the winter of 2018-19, we are at 26.3 inches and counting—we have exceeded the total of the past three years combined.

Through our years in Kansas City, my husband has been the primary shoveler. Except when he was on Naval Reserve duty when I had to do it. In the years when we had dogs and had to shovel out the dog run and a path from the back door to the yard, I typically helped.

Our kids helped on occasion during their high school years. Like me, when our son was young, he did so only when requested. But our daughter professed to like to shovel snow. (I don’t know where she got that gene.) Now she is an adult homeowner. This winter when Seattle got hit with a lot of snow, she borrowed a shovel from a neighbor and did the sidewalk in front of her apartment complex.

Because my husband has some stiffness from his kneecap surgery last year, I have done almost all of the snow shoveling this winter. That means I have shoveled seven (as of February 20, 2019) times this season. (We had another storm that left an inch of ice that was impossible to clear until the temperatures went above freezing a week after it fell—I’m not counting that.)

What have I learned from my shoveling responsibilities?

1. It is a lot easier to push the snow than to throw it. I use a scoop shovel, push a load to the edge of the drive, and throw it on top of the growing pile.

2. It takes 45-60 minutes to complete the task at our current home, no matter how much snow has fallen. Heavier snow or more of it means I work harder in that time period, but I can’t seem to manage the lighter snowfalls any faster.

3. My standards at clearing the concrete are inversely proportional both to the frequency with which I have to shovel and to the amount of snow to clear. In other words, it’s hard to stay motivated after the first snowfall of the season.

4. Shoveling snow makes even using the elliptical at the gym (my alternative form of cardio exercise) seem interesting. On the elliptical, I can read. While shoveling, all I see is white stuff, and when my glasses fog up, not even that.

5. Our neighbors are good people. Most of us do not stop at the property line. We keep going down the sidewalk for some distance farther. One man with a snowblower does an older couple’s drive and walks. We aren’t a particularly chummy street, except during shoveling season. I hope our neighbors at our new home will be as helpful.

As I cleared the drive and walks for the third time last week—dealing with a heavy, wet snow of about 4-5 inches—all I could think was, “Please, God, let this be the last time I shovel snow at this house.” Unfortunately, I then realized that our new house has a drive for a three-car garage—it might be shorter than our current drive, but it is definitely wider. And so far, we only have neighbors on one side of us. It looks like I’ll be in for more cardio exercise next winter.

What has your experience been shoveling snow?