Years ago, before I had the great fortune to work at the library, I was employed by the local city school system. During this time, especially in the darker months of winter, we still got snow fairly regularly. On the mornings when inclement weather was expected, we would rise earlier than usual, put on the local news stations and watch the scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen to see if our school was delayed or canceled. Our lads would be sitting quietly in the living room, eating drippy cereal, watching eagle-eyed, memorizing the list of potential closings and hoping to see our school system go by.
Elliott, our oldest, decided one morning that it would be prudent to do a snow dance. I'm not sure where he learned this particular skill, but I will say that on several occasions which still defy natural laws, that little fellow danced and it damn well snowed. Perhaps it could be defined as coincidence, but I don't believe the universe is that lazy. Regardless of how or why it worked, it did seem to work. So, anytime a snowfall would be welcome and convenient, we told him it might be a good idea to shuffle or shimmy with that in mind. I am at heart a natural skeptic. I have reinforced this inbuilt tendency with years of study. Other disruptions in the natural laws I will doubt until the cows are called home across the Sands of Dee. The Snow Dance I will believe in until Micki brings down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. I know what I believe despite the scientific principles that are being challenged. This kid danced. It snowed. We had a day off school. That's powerful stuff.
How was I to know that, all the while we were encouraging this simple weather jig, there was a power working hard against Elliott's magic dance. I didn't actually know about this until halfway through my time in the schools or perhaps I might have been more keen to intervene on his behalf against the sinister counter magic at play. Forces very close to me were aligned against this sweet, good-hearted boy’s ability to dance up snow and I was soon to discover just how potent they were.
The first time I truly understood there were other interests at work beyond Elliott, I remember distinctly it was a Sunday morning. Snow was forecast overnight. Several inches would follow a thin sheen of ice, as sleet transformed into snow as the temperature dropped below freezing. At the very least, we were guaranteed a two-hour delay that next Monday. Yet, it seemed hopeful that we might be in the swath of what the TV prognosticators were predicting would dump three-to-five inches over the piedmont. Bands of various shades from light blue to deep purple swept across the map of our state on the TV screen as infinitely talkative meteorologists filled the local airwaves with endless winter augury. After exchanging meaningful glances with each other, the family looked to Elliott who rose silently from his spot on our family couch, nodded solemnly and went to his room to limber up and prepare for the ritual. Even as he bravely set forth, somewhere in the city, a manic hand reached out of its front door and placed a snow shovel on the porch as a warding sorcery against the coming snow.
I grew up in the North. When it snows—and it used to snow a lot—there's not so much chatter. Sure, we would listen to cancellations on the radio, but it took way more than flurries to stop the school buses. We had to have at least five inches guaranteed before the school system I attended as a young scholar would even consider shutting things down. Even then, once the roads had been plowed, the buses—equipped with chains and sand—would roll and we had better be on them. Here in North Carolina, it takes just the whisper of the word ‘snow’ for panic to ensue and everything shuts down in anticipation. I have seen a four car pile up on a dry, sunny day just because some newscaster put it out there that the white stuff might make an appearance. As a result of this madness, school is canceled usually at the drop of, in this case, a flake. So to my Northern heart, the Southern flutter caused by inclement weather has always been a bit daft, but that’s just how things are here.
However, my coworker, who also grew up and lived in the North for most of their life, had been filled to the eye teeth with bad weather. They had moved to this part of the world to get away from the apparently unending winter there. In response to any hint of ‘the white stuff’ they had developed a habit of setting out their snow shovel as a kind of apotropaic against any incoming inclemency. Like with Elliott’s snow dances, I had seen this coworker’s shovel work, too. At least three times over the years, they had set out this powerful totem and snow that had been forecast vanished. One of those times, we’d been promised at least six inches over the beginning of the week and the Friday before, they put out their anti-snow weapon. As if on cue, meteorologists all over the central part of the state began changing their tune. Six inches dropped to three and then dwindled to a dusting. Temps rose, and even the rain that remained broke up like an angsty garage band and we had unseasonably balmy and sunny weather.
When I asked why they hated to be off school (so far as I know, no school staff ever would be disposed to go to school if the day could be canceled due to weather) the reason they gave only added to my unhappy feelings. If they cancel school, they said, they take days away from our Easter Break (they meant Spring Break, but I understood). Here in NC, for each day that the snow flies and the buses stay locked, one day is taken from the end of the week designated for our Spring Break. One year, we had so much crappy weather that we lost all but one day of that essential and necessary rest in the longest and most intolerable stretch of otherwise uninterrupted school. Snow meant less break. So, my coworker put out their magic shovel.
I sympathized. When in school in the backwater district in Pennsylvania, they not only drew from Spring Break time, but then tacked on days at the end of the school year, pushing the end date out into the glorious days of freedom we had worked for and desperately needed. In 1993, we had gotten so much snow (including a full-on blizzard at the end of March) that June positively felt like Purgatory. I don’t think we got out that summer until just a few days before we had to go back. We called it The Year Without A Summer and I’m positive that the decline and fall of some of my classmates into criminal endeavors can be traced to this particular year. Nevertheless, even the year North Carolina had “snowpocalypse” it was absolutely nothing in comparison to ‘93’s devastation. But now, thanks to my coworker, the shovel was ruining even a tiny chance of snow for everyone and it was working in direct antipathy to the fancy footwork of a very gifted young snow dancer who merely wanted a day off occasionally to play in the snow.
To his family, Elliott was doing the people’s work. He could swing a dashed efficient shoe and his gyrations had accomplished much by giving us needed days off here and there throughout the winter. My coworker’s shovel therefore, despite its apparent potency, had to go. I might have been a little less ready to act, had this particular individual not been in other ways an intolerable person. Their magic shovel might have just been a thing to accept. However, this was by far not the most evil and nefarious thing this coworker had done over the years. In fact I’ve had few experiences outside of foodservice with someone who was less desirable to be around in nearly every way. If the shovel was all that they did to mess things up for me, then I would have been less likely to get involved. By challenging Elliott’s snow dancing, they called down the thunder (or rather, didn’t) and so, they were going to get weather of a different sort.
The statute of limitation is probably well past on this particular story, but I’m not one to self-incriminate. All I’ll say is that several of us at work were asked to help with some “heavy lifting” at this coworker’s house one weekend to move and prepare some things for a garage sale. The shovel, which was prominently displayed even then during the warmer Fall days, may have been moved into the back of the tool shed from which we were removing items. It may have been placed behind some other garden tools at the very back under an old, ratty tarp, hard to spot from the doorway and even more difficult to get to.
One day later in the school year, probably in January, I came into work to find that my coworker had gone to put out their shovel to stop the snow and found that it was missing from its usual place of honor probably by a shrine honoring muggy equatorial weather. It also wasn’t on the porch. They were completely fogged by the missing tool, but as the day progressed, they realized that perhaps the tool had been left out too long and mistakenly removed with a pile of yard sale goods and possibly sold. I acted surprised and distressed on their behalf but gave up nothing. We Bare’s can wear the mask.
As if to underline the power of this shovel, within weeks of its disappearance, snow began to fall like gangbusters all over the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. It was glorious and all-too brief. As I looked out of our home at the falling snow I cast my eye in the direction of the neighborhood where my coworker lived and smiled a devious smile. ‘Take that,’ I said under my breath and then went and had a cup of hot cocoa. For a few more years after that, we had snow regularly that canceled school or that delayed the start. We would make homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese and have endless snowball fights and make small snow people in the yard. I would shovel the front walk and the driveway. We reveled in the sheer joy of falling snow.
Time moves on and seasons change and bring their own respective joys and challenges. Elliott grew into adolescence and quit believing in Santa Claus and snow dances. I changed jobs and realized that there is an entire reality outside of the school-system mindset (and away from the mindlessness of awful coworkers). Snow fell less and less in our part of the world as the years passed, but that probably had to do with environmental concerns, rather than magic dances or warding shovels.
Then, about two years ago, we had a serious warning for very wintry weather. Snow was forecast and we were set to get several inches. Temps began to drop and hovered just below freezing. The sky turned iron-grey. The wind kicked out of the north like a stung mule. Shelves at the town grocery markets went completely out of bread and milk. The town became dismally quiet. Everyone was “hunkering”. Then, as if by magic—and I believe it was magic—the sun came out, the wind swung to the south and the few drops of precipitation that we got were most assuredly not frozen. Such is the weather in North Carolina, people said. My heart sank. I knew it wasn’t just the weather.
The day the bad weather vanished, I happened to be passing the house where my former coworker lived. There by their front door was the old snow shovel. It was locked behind a small, closet-sized chain link enclosure and secured with a heavy padlock. It was rustier, grungier than before, but it was that same yard tool from years before. As I looked, my heart burning within me, I saw the curtains in the front window drop closed. Just before they did, I swear that there were a pair of beady, glinting eyes burning out of the darkness at me. Had they given me a knowing look? I can never be sure. All I know is that the snow shovel somehow found its way back to the hand of its master.
I won’t say there is a direct correlation between the lack of snow in recent years and that chained up shovel, but I’m also not ruling it out. At this point, I’ve seen too much in the weather wars to be easily convinced otherwise. Elliott, now a full adult, probably wouldn’t dance for cash money. His childlike idealism has melted into the cynicism of people who have to go to work whether it snows or not and who don’t get summers off. His mother currently works in the school system, but now, instead of canceling school, they just do online classes, a sorcery discovered during the pandemic. I’ve often wondered if the magic that gave birth to the snow shovel also devised this new devilry. Gone into another era are the scrolling lists of school closings, but then, gone too are the snowy days that used to break up the agony and monotony of school days and terrible coworkers.
And yet, any time there is a serious winter weather advisory for our area, I casually drive past that coworker’s house to see if that infernal snow shovel is in its little chain link enclosure. If it is, I make my heart a stone, because we won’t get any snow. If we do, it may mean that somewhere, somehow an idealistic child is dancing their little heart out.
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