I’m eighty-one and I live alone, and the thing I dread most about winter is the snow. My hip won’t let me shovel anymore, and a plowed-in driveway can leave me stranded for days. So last winter, when I woke to find my drive already cleared, I thought I’d dreamed it.
But it happened again the next snow, and the next. Someone was shoveling my driveway before dawn, so early and so quietly I never heard a thing. Finally I set my alarm and caught him at it — Marcus, the seventeen-year-old from next door, bundled up in the dark, working steady.
I tried to pay him. I tried every week all winter long. He would just smile, a little shy, and say, ‘No thank you, ma’am, I’ve got it,’ and go back to his shoveling. I baked him cookies, which he accepted, but money, never.
I didn’t know Marcus well. His family had moved in only a year before. He was a quiet boy, polite, always with his earbuds in. I assumed his parents had simply raised him to help his elders, and I thanked God for him more than once during those long cold months.
When spring finally came and the snow melted for good, I saw his mother out at the mailbox one morning, and I went over to tell her what a fine young man she’d raised. She smiled, but her eyes went soft and sad, and she said, ‘Did Marcus never tell you why he does it?’
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