A Widow's Bones and Winters Past

The sky was ash-gray and accumulating snow is predicted for overnight but the snow that was falling this morning was so light it rose up in tiny whirlwinds as the car in front of me went down the highway.  I was on my way to my orthopedic doctor’s office for my two week post shoulder surgery appointment. I’m doing well. He offered me a shot for pain. I refused it, don’t need it. He offered me another round of Prednisone for swelling. Oh, boy! I took it. I love that stuff. It makes my bones feel twenty years younger and like I could take up bench pressing in my spare time. He showed me before and after photos of my shoulder joint taken during surgery and I asked him if it’s like playing a video game when he’s moving a camera and two gadgets around inside a person installing a labrum tear patch. “Sort of,” he answered. I have to go back in a month and then he’ll order some physical therapy. Bummer. I don’t like having appointments in the winter.

The photo above is of me and Don and that was the smallest of three front-end loaders that he used to stack snow on the malls we plowed.  We called them Poppa, Momma and Baby. He did his best to get me to love operating Baby and I did try it a few times but I figured if I didn’t put my foot down I’d be running it all the time and it didn’t have “central heat” or a radio and back in those days I listened to books on tape every night we plowed. At one point in time he had four women (and three guys) working for him and a couple of the women really loved running Baby. I’m talking 20 years ago when it was more unusual for women to be driving heavy equipment than it is now. 

He liked having women snow plowers for several reasons, one of which was he claimed it was easier to teach women to plow because we followed instructions and didn’t try to re-invent the wheel. Another reason he loved having women plowers was for the shock value we brought to the table. It was pretty funny. From what we heard from the snowplow repair places Don was the first person in town to hire women to plow snow, and it put a dent in a few male egos of guys who didn’t believe a woman could or should do that kind of work. He was probably the only guy I ever knew who read Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique back in its day and he took it to heart. But before that, he watched how hard his mother worked feeding and washing clothes for four sons, a husband and two hired hands. She had a hard life. Her garden put food on the table. She raised chickens, sold eggs to the local grocer. She canned and did all the other things expected from a farm wife and with no daughters to help.

I think back to my snow plowing days and I wonder how I got to be such a chicken about driving in Michigan winters. Since Don died, I pick and choose the days I drive and it makes me nervous as all get out when I can’t avoid going out on unplowed roads. I was a good wintertime driver. I could do control skids and bank snow at the end of a runs without even stopping which is hard to master and I won more rat hockey matches than anyone else. Yes, real rats that would venture out on a parking lot in the middle of the night got escorted across the lots with two or three trucks chasing them, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat fly across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other when it was sliding and we’d score if you were the one to run it into a snow bank. Rat hockey didn’t happen often but it sure was fun when it did and it’s a wonder none of us ever collided with our silly game. But I lost my wintertime driving confidence after Don died and I sold our four wheel drive Traverse. Cars feel so wimpy after decades of driving heavy, four wheel drive trucks and SUVs. Maybe having physical therapy appointments to force me out on winter days when I’d rather stay home is just what I need to get my confidence back, says the lady who always tries to find the up side of any given situation.

After the doctor’s appointment I went to the first of a series of classes on genealogy research that I signed up for at the senior center. I really don’t need a class but for only $3.00 a session I figured I can get something useful out of them. There were sixteen there today and we all shared funny stories about oddities we’d found while poking around the family bones so I got my money’s worth in laughter. ©