So No One Can See

After a night of snow (always a fitful night for the clouds, I think, tossing and turning, trying to coat the earth evenly with their powdery delights), when our driveways are indistinguishable from the white and more white around them, my neighbor gets up early. 

I can hear the telltale scrape of shovel against snow against cracked driveway tar from inside my nest of black-and-white covers that somehow match the world outside. Sometimes, when the clouds have done their job well (those days when you can fall into the thick white piles just outside your door and never come back out), all I can make out from my bed is a soft hiss-thump, hiss-thump as my neighbor throws the masses of snow behind him with seemingly superhuman strength.

I think my neighbor comes out this early (when the sun has barely finished putting on her dusty pink robes of morning, when only the children of the street are awake, listening from where they're snuggled into their heavy winter blankets) so no well-meaning but unnaturally saccharine mother can see him struggle to lift the shovel one last time, and so no sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman jogging through the neighborhood can spy him miss the pile of snow he was aiming for and hit the curb instead, swaying with the momentum.

So no one can see him wave to me when he rests upon his shovel, his sighs too long and heavy for this earth to hold; so no one can see him light up like the sun (at last!) when I finally crawl out from my covers and peek through the blinds, comforted by the hiss-thump of the shovel; and so no one can see me wave back.

Well, no person can see these things. We both know that the trees, with hearts made of golden sap and limbs made of graying bark that will spring to life again soon, are always watching.

But you won't say anything, will you, trees?