Nine Days
My Aunt Ione called me on a Tuesday afternoon in January, the day after the blizzard finally blew itself out. I was in the bus garage at the Norway Lake school district, flat on my back on a creeper under Bus 14 with a drop light hooked to the frame, trying to figure out why its air brakes kept bleeding down overnight. My phone buzzed in the pocket of my coveralls, and when I saw her name on the screen I rolled out from under the bus so fast I bumped my head on the bumper.
Aunt Ione doesn’t call during the day. She is of the generation that believes long distance is expensive and phone calls are for emergencies, Christmas, and funerals, and she has never quite accepted that I live only six miles away. So when her name came up on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon, my stomach dropped before I even answered.
“Jessa,” she said. Her voice was calm, the way it always is, the calm of a woman who spent thirty-eight years as a nurse at the hospital in Willmar. “I don’t want you to worry. But I wondered if you might have time to come by this week.”
“Are you all right? Is it your heart?”
“My heart’s fine,” she said. “It’s my pills I’m worried about. The post office is holding my mail. I called them this morning. They said the carrier can’t get to my box, so they’ve been holding it at the counter in Sunburg. My heart pills are in there, from the mail-order pharmacy.” She paused. “I have through Thursday.”
I sat up on the creeper with my back against the bus tire. Aunt Ione takes a pill called Eliquis for her heart, and another one for her blood pressure, and she gets them in a three-month supply through the mail from the Medicare pharmacy her insurance uses. She is the most organized person I have ever known. She orders her refills two weeks early, every time, and keeps a little calendar on her refrigerator where she checks off each day’s pills with a pencil.
“How long since you’ve had mail, Aunt Ione?”
She was quiet on the line, and I could hear her counting under her breath the way she counts everything, carefully, touching each day on that refrigerator calendar.
“Nine days,” she said.
Nine days. I closed my eyes. The first storm had come through the Friday before last, a foot of heavy snow that turned to ice on top, and then the blizzard had hit Sunday night and blown for two straight days. Twenty-two inches on top of what was already down, with the wind gusting to fifty and the drifts on the township road as high as a pickup cab. The plows had been out on County Road 14 since Monday night, but the township road where Aunt Ione lives had only been opened that morning.
“Is the road clear now?” I asked.
“The road’s clear,” she said. “It’s my driveway that isn’t. Or the end of it, anyway. The carrier can’t get to the box.” She paused again. “It’s Hollis’s snow, Jessa. Same as always. Only this time it’s taller than I am.”
Chapter Two: The Berm
My Aunt Ione never married. She is my father’s older sister, eighty-three years old, and she has lived alone in the red farmhouse at the end of Brandvold Road for most of her life. Our family farmed that land for a hundred years, until my grandfather sold the fields to the neighbors in the eighties, but he kept the house and the five acres around it and gave them to Ione, because she was the one who came home from nursing school to take care of him and Grandma when they got old. She has been there ever since, with her garden and her bird feeders and her gray cat named Thor, and her red mailbox at the end of a gravel drive that runs out to the township road.
Her driveway sits right beside Hollis Brandvold’s lane. The two of them run side by side out to the road, maybe fifty feet apart, with a strip of grass and a row of lilacs between them. The Brandvolds have farmed the place across the lilacs since the 1880s, and the road itself is named after them. Hollis is forty-four now, and he took over the farm when his father died two springs ago.
Every storm, Hollis turned his blade to the right. He plows his own lane with a big blade on the front of an old John Deere, a quarter mile from his yard out to the road, and when he gets to the end of it, he swings the tractor around and shoves everything he’s pushed off to the right side. Off to the right is the end of Aunt Ione’s driveway. Every scoop landed there, right in front of her mailbox, and by morning it was packed hard as a curb, a ridge of plowed snow and ice that froze solid overnight and wouldn’t move for anything short of a jackhammer.
Last winter there were nine storms. Every single one left a new ridge at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive, a little taller than the one before. She is eighty-three years old and five foot one, and every single time she went out with a shovel and chipped her way through it so she could get her car out and the carrier could reach her box. Sometimes it took her two hours. Twice, I drove out after work and did it for her in the dark with a pick and a scoop shovel while she stood on her porch with a flashlight, telling me to be careful of my back.
I asked Hollis twice, nicely. The first time was in December of last year, after the third storm, when I happened to see him at the Cenex in Sunburg filling his pickup. I walked over and said hello and asked if he could maybe angle his blade the other way when he got to the end of his lane, toward the field on the left, because the snow was piling up across Aunt Ione’s drive. He listened politely, a big quiet man in a seed cap and a canvas chore coat, and then he shrugged.
“Snow’s got to go somewhere, Jessa,” he said. “That’s the way Dad always pushed it.”
The second time was in February, after the sixth storm. I drove over to his place on a Saturday and knocked on his door, and he came out on the step in his socks looking tired and rumpled, and I asked him again. He said he’d try to remember. He didn’t. The next storm, the ridge was back, a little taller.
His late father, Arvid, had pushed snow that way for forty years. That was the part I couldn’t understand. In forty years, I never once heard Aunt Ione complain about the end of her driveway. I never once saw a ridge there when I was growing up, never once had to shovel it out, never once heard her mention it. It was only after Arvid died and Hollis took over the tractor that the berm appeared. I didn’t think Hollis had ever once looked back to see where his snow landed.
I could have called the township. There’s a state law in Minnesota against pushing snow out onto a public road, and the township board would have sent Hollis a letter. But his snow wasn’t on the road, exactly. It was on the end of my aunt’s private drive, which was a different kind of problem, the kind you settle with a lawyer and a lot of bad feelings. And a feud between the two families on Brandvold Road would take months to sort out. It would not get Aunt Ione her heart pills by Thursday.
Chapter Three: Dad’s Loader
I fix school buses for a living. I’ve been the head mechanic for the Norway Lake district for eleven years, keeping fourteen buses running through Minnesota winters that would kill a lesser machine. I know diesel engines and air brakes and hydraulics, and I know what cold does to all of them.
What I don’t own is anything that can move twenty-two inches of packed snow. I have a pickup with a plow on it, but a pickup plow won’t touch a frozen berm. I needed something with real weight and real power and a bucket. I needed my dad’s loader.
My dad is seventy, and he had a brand-new knee. Dr. Halvorson in Willmar replaced his left one in December, three weeks before Christmas, and he was still walking with a cane and doing his exercises every morning at the kitchen table, lifting his leg with a strap. He was supposed to stay off ladders and out of cold weather for another month. He couldn’t climb up on his old yellow loader yet, and he hated it.
The loader is a 1978 John Deere, an old four-wheel-drive farm loader with a big bucket on the front and an open seat on top with no cab at all. Dad bought it at a farm sale in Kandiyohi County thirty years ago for six thousand dollars, and he has used it every winter since to clear his own yard and half the neighbors’ too. It is ugly and loud and slow, and it has never once failed to start, though sometimes it takes some convincing.
I drove over to Dad’s place after work on Tuesday and found him in his recliner with his leg up on a pillow, watching the weather on Channel 11 out of Minneapolis. I told him about Aunt Ione’s pills and the post office and the nine days. He listened without saying anything, his jaw getting tighter the whole time, and when I got to the part about the ridge being taller than she is, he set the remote down on the arm of his chair very carefully.
“That Brandvold boy,” he said. “His dad never did that. Not once in forty years.”
“I know, Dad.”
He looked down at his knee, propped up on the pillow, and I could see him wanting to get up and go do it himself. Then he let out a long breath and pointed toward the back door.
“Key’s on the nail,” he said. “In the shop, by the door. Plug the block heater in tonight, or she won’t start in the morning. Supposed to be ten below.”
“Thank you.”
“And Jessa.” He looked at me. “Wear your good gloves. The leather ones with the liners. That seat’s wide open, and at ten below, you’ll feel every mile.”
I went out to the shop and found the key hanging on its nail where it’s hung my whole life, on a ring with a little brass tag that says JD in Dad’s handwriting. I ran an extension cord out to the loader and plugged in the block heater so the engine would stay warm overnight. Then I stood there in the cold shop for a minute with my hand on the big yellow tire, thinking about Aunt Ione chipping at that ridge alone with her shovel.
Chapter Four: Ten Below
At first light on Wednesday it was ten below. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, just bright, hard blue sky the way it gets after a blizzard moves through, and the snow lay over everything like a fresh white sheet with long blue shadows stretching across it. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. Every sound carried for a mile.
I pulled my gray knit cap down over my ponytail and zipped my green work coat all the way to my chin. I had two pairs of wool socks inside my insulated boots, Dad’s leather gloves with the liners, and a scarf my mother knitted wrapped twice around my face. I still felt the cold the second I stepped out of my pickup in Dad’s yard.
The loader started on the third try. The first try it groaned and turned over slowly and didn’t catch. The second try it coughed once and died. The third time it roared to life and blew a cloud of black smoke out of the stack, and then it settled into a rough, steady rumble, and I sat there on the cold seat letting it warm up while my breath froze on my scarf.
It has an open cab, which means no cab at all, just a seat and a steering wheel and the levers, with nothing between you and the weather. At ten below, driving down a township road at fifteen miles an hour, the wind cuts through everything you’re wearing. By the time I’d gone the two miles from Dad’s place to Brandvold Road, I couldn’t feel my nose, and my eyes were watering so hard the tears froze on my eyelashes.
I went to Aunt Ione’s first.
She was already out by her mailbox when I came around the curve, standing at the end of her driveway in her long navy wool coat, the one she has worn to church every Sunday since 1979. She had a white knit hat pulled over her white hair and a pair of old leather mittens on, and she had a shovel in her hands. She was chipping at the ridge.
It was taller than she was. I could see that from the road. Hollis’s blade had shoved it up into a hard wall of ice and packed snow maybe five feet high, running all the way across the end of her drive and around her red mailbox, so the box stuck up out of the top of it like a flag on a mountain. And my eighty-three-year-old aunt was standing in front of it with a square-nosed shovel, chipping away little pieces of ice, one at a time.
I pulled the loader up beside her and shut the throttle down so I could hear. She turned around and looked up at me, and her cheeks were bright red from the cold, and her eyes were watering too.
“Jessa,” she said. “I was going to get it myself.”
“I know you were, Aunt Ione.”
“I’ve been out here since seven. I got about this much.” She showed me a little notch she’d chipped in the top of the ridge, maybe six inches deep. “I just thought, if I could get to the box, the carrier could bring my pills tomorrow.”
“Step back,” I said. “Over by the lilacs.”
She stepped back. I dropped the bucket and drove into that ridge, and the loader shuddered when it hit the packed ice, but it broke. The first bite took the top off it. The second bite opened a notch down to the gravel. I backed up and came at it from the side, and the third bite cleared most of the wall in front of her mailbox, and the fourth bite pushed the last of it off into the ditch on the left side, toward the field.
I broke that ridge open in four bites. It took maybe three minutes.
When it was done, I shut the loader down and sat there for a second in the sudden quiet. Aunt Ione walked out to her mailbox, picking her way carefully over the broken chunks of ice, and stopped in front of it. She reached up and put her mittened hand on top of the red box. She just left it there, resting on the top, the way you’d put your hand on the shoulder of an old friend.
“I’ve been looking at this box for nine days,” she said quietly. “From my kitchen window.”
I didn’t say anything. My throat was too tight.
Chapter Five: Eleven Walls
Then I looked down the road.
Brandvold Road runs a mile and a half from County Road 14 to where it dead-ends at Norway Lake, and there are eleven houses on it, counting Aunt Ione’s and Hollis’s. From the seat of the loader, sitting up high in the cold, I could see the whole length of it in the bright morning sun. The township plow had come through that morning and opened the road itself, one lane wide with high walls of snow on either side.
And at the end of every single driveway, there was a wall.
The township plow had done the same thing to everybody that Hollis had done to Aunt Ione. When a road plow comes through after a blizzard, it shoves everything off to the side, and everything off to the side lands right across the end of everybody’s driveway. Every house on Brandvold Road had a packed ridge of snow and ice across the end of its drive, some of them four feet tall. Eleven houses. Eleven walls of snow.
I sat there on the loader for a long time looking at it.
If I only did Aunt Ione’s, it would be a feud. That’s how it would look. Everybody on the road would see that Leroy Thorvaldson’s daughter fired up his loader and cleared her aunt’s drive and left the Brandvold berm sitting there for the whole world to look at, and it would be one family against another. People would take sides. People would talk at church and at the Cenex. Hollis would hear about it, and the next storm he’d push the snow right back where it was out of pure stubbornness, and it would go on for years.
But if I did the whole road, it was just neighbors after a storm.
So I kept going.
The next house down was Gus Lindquist’s, a little white house at the curve where the road bends toward the lake. Gus is seventy-nine, a widower since last spring. His wife, Ruth, died of cancer in April, and since then he mostly stays inside watching the Twins on TV and the Weather Channel. His ridge was three feet high across his drive, and his old Buick was buried to the door handles in his yard. I broke the ridge in three bites and cleared a path up to his garage, and when I came back down to the road, he was standing on his front step in a bathrobe and a stocking cap, holding a coffee cup in both hands, staring at me.
“Thank you, Jessa,” he called. His voice sounded rusty. “I didn’t know how I was going to get to church Sunday.”
Past Gus was a young family in a new house, a gray split-level built three years ago. Tess Anderson is twenty-eight, a nurse’s aide at the care center in Sunburg, and she has twin boys who are four. Her husband drives truck and was somewhere in Montana. She was out in her drive with a snow shovel and both boys in snowsuits, trying to dig out her minivan, and when I came up the road she put the shovel down and burst into tears.
“I’ve got a shift at two,” she said, when I stopped the loader. “If I don’t get there, they’ll cut my hours. I’ve been out here since six.”
I cleared her driveway and her parking pad and a path to the front door, and the twin boys stood in the snowbank by the mailbox the whole time, waving at me with both arms and shouting “Tractor!” every time I went by.
Chapter Six: Merle’s Eggs
People came out onto the shoulders in their boots.
I didn’t notice it at first. I was busy with the loader, working the levers with my frozen hands, backing and turning and dropping the bucket. But somewhere around the fourth house, I looked up and saw people standing at the end of their driveways in the cold, in their chore coats and Sorel boots and stocking caps, watching. Some of them were out shoveling their own front walks. Some of them were just standing there.
Somebody handed me coffee. At the fifth house, the Halvorsens’, Judy Halvorsen came out to the road in her husband’s barn coat carrying a thermos and handed it up to me without a word. It was so hot it burned my lips, and I drank half of it sitting on the loader seat with steam rising off the cup into the frozen air. When I tried to give the thermos back, she shook her head and told me to keep it.
Merle Anderson lives at the sixth house, a little farmhouse with a red barn and a chicken coop out back. He’s eighty-eight, no relation to Tess, a retired dairy farmer who still keeps two dozen laying hens because he says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in the morning without them. He couldn’t reach his chickens. The drift between his back door and the coop was five feet deep, and he’d been tossing feed out his kitchen window into the snow for two days and hoping for the best.
I cleared his driveway, and then I took the loader around back and cut a path from his door to the coop. Merle stood on his back step in a buffalo plaid hunting coat leaning on a broom, watching me, and when I was done, he climbed carefully down the steps and walked out to the loader. He reached up and set something on the step beside my boot. It was a cardboard egg carton, a dozen brown eggs, still warm.
“From the girls,” he said. “They’ve been laying the whole storm. Couldn’t get them to anybody.”
At the seventh place, I cleared Sonja Hagen’s dairy. Sonja runs sixty cows with her son, and the milk truck from the co-op in Litchfield was due at ten o’clock. Her son had cleared the yard with their skid steer, but the end of their lane was buried, and if that milk truck couldn’t get in, they’d have to dump two days of milk. I cleared the lane and the turnaround in twenty minutes, and when I came back out to the road at nine-fifty, the big silver milk tanker was just coming around the curve. The driver honked twice and waved as he went by me.
By the ninth driveway, they were waving from every porch.
I didn’t wave back much. My hands were busy on the levers, and my fingers were so cold inside Dad’s gloves I could barely feel them, and my throat was tight in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. I kept my head down and kept working.
At the tenth house, the Petersons’, somebody came up beside the loader on foot. It was Darlene Sundquist, the rural mail carrier, in her Postal Service parka with the eagle patch on the shoulder. Her car was parked on the road behind me with its flashers on, a little Jeep with the steering wheel on the right side.
“I heard what you’re doing,” she said, shouting over the engine. “Your aunt called the post office. She told them to send me out.” She held up a big white plastic tub full of mail. “Nine days of it, for this whole road. I’ve been following you house to house.”
I looked back down the road behind me. Sure enough, at every mailbox I’d cleared, the little red flag was down and the door was shut. Darlene had been right behind me the whole time, filling them.
“Did my aunt get her pills?” I asked.
Darlene smiled. “First stop,” she said. “She was standing right there waiting for me with her hand on the box.”
Chapter Seven: The Last Lane
Ten driveways by twenty past eleven.
That left one.
I sat on the loader at the end of the Peterson drive with the engine idling and looked back up the road toward Aunt Ione’s. From there, I could see Hollis Brandvold’s lane running north from the road through his snowy fields, a quarter mile to his yard and his big white farmhouse and his red barns. His lane was still drifted shut. The blizzard had piled it four and five feet deep in places, and the township plow had walled off the end of it with a ridge as tall as the one I’d broken at Aunt Ione’s.
Hollis works nights. He drives a forklift on the night shift at the turkey processing plant in Willmar, eleven at night to seven in the morning, and he farms his land in between. I knew he must have gone in to work Tuesday night somehow, maybe with a buddy who had a four-by-four, and gotten a ride back that morning. His pickup was buried in his yard. He’d be asleep now, I figured, with his curtains pulled, sleeping off a ten-hour shift.
I could have stopped right there. Ten out of eleven. Nobody on that road would have blamed me. Some of them would have said it served him right.
I cleared it anyway.
I drove the loader up to the end of his lane and broke through the township ridge in four bites, the same as I’d done at Aunt Ione’s. Then I started up the lane toward his yard. A quarter mile of drifted snow, packed hard by two days of wind. It took me twenty minutes, bucket after bucket, pushing forward and backing up and pushing forward again.
And every single scoop, I pushed left into the field. Every bucketful of snow I took off Hollis Brandvold’s lane, I carried to the left side and dumped it in his own field, away from the lilacs and away from Aunt Ione’s drive. A quarter mile of it.
When I got to his yard, I cleared a turnaround in front of his garage so he could get his pickup out. Then I backed all the way down the lane to the road.
Then I scraped the last of his old berm off Aunt Ione’s drive. There was still a little left there along the edge of her driveway, the bottom layers of last winter’s ridges and this winter’s, packed down and frozen into the gravel, a hard gray crust maybe eight inches thick. I dropped the edge of the bucket and scraped it, carefully, back and forth, the way Dad taught me to scrape a yard so you don’t tear up the gravel underneath.
I scraped it down to bare gravel. Brown and gray and dry in the cold sun, with the snow pushed back neatly on both sides. You could see exactly where Aunt Ione’s driveway ended and Hollis’s lane began, with the strip of grass and the lilacs in between, clean and clear for the first time in two winters.
I shut the loader off at 11:52.
Chapter Eight: The Door
The whole road went quiet.
You don’t realize how loud a loader is until you shut it off. That big old diesel had been roaring in my ears for five hours, and when I turned the key, the silence came down like a blanket. I could hear the wind moving across the snow in the fields. I could hear a cow lowing over at Sonja’s dairy and Merle’s chickens clucking a quarter mile away. I could hear my own heartbeat.
I sat there on the cold seat at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive and looked down the road.
Every single neighbor was out. I don’t know when it happened. Sometime in the last hour, while I was clearing Hollis’s lane, they’d all come out of their houses and walked to the ends of their driveways, the ones I’d cleared that morning. Gus in his bathrobe and stocking cap. Tess with her twin boys in their snowsuits. Judy Halvorsen. Merle with his broom. Sonja and her son from the dairy. The Petersons. Darlene the mail carrier was still there too, leaning on the hood of her Jeep with a cup of coffee.
Aunt Ione came out of her house and walked down her clean gravel drive to stand beside the loader. She had her shovel. She leaned on it beside me, in her navy wool coat, and looked down the road with the rest of us.
That’s when Hollis’s front door opened.
Across the lilacs and a quarter mile up his newly cleared lane, the front door of the big white Brandvold farmhouse swung open. Hollis came out onto his front step. He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt and no coat at all, with his hair sticking up on one side from sleeping. He must have heard the loader. Or maybe he’d heard the silence when it stopped.
He looked at his lane first. A quarter mile of it, cleared and smooth all the way to the road, with the snow pushed off to the left into his field.
Then he looked at the end of it, at Aunt Ione’s driveway beside his, scraped down to bare gravel where his ridge had been. Where his ridge had been for two winters.
Then he looked down the road at every neighbor he had, standing in the sun, looking back at him.
Nobody said a word.
He stood on his front step in his T-shirt at ten below zero for what felt like a very long time. I couldn’t see his face from that distance, only the shape of him, a big man standing very still in a doorway. Then he went back inside, and I thought maybe that was it. Maybe he’d just close the door and go back to bed.
He came back out a minute later in his canvas chore coat and his boots, unlaced. He came down his step. And he started walking toward us down his lane, slow, with his hands at his sides.
Chapter Nine: What Arvid Did
It took him five minutes to walk the quarter mile. Nobody on the road moved. Nobody went back inside. We all just stood there and watched him come, a big man walking slowly down a cleared lane between two walls of snow, his breath steaming in front of him.
He stopped at the end of his lane, right beside the strip of lilacs. Aunt Ione’s bare gravel was on his left. The loader was there, and me on it, and Aunt Ione standing beside it with her shovel. He looked at the gravel for a long time. Then he looked up at me.
“You did my lane,” he said. His voice was rough with sleep.
“I did everybody’s,” I said.
“You pushed it left.” He looked back up the lane, at the snow piled neatly in his field. “Into my field.”
“Snow’s got to go somewhere, Hollis.”
He flinched. I hadn’t meant it to sting, exactly, but I watched it land. He looked down at the gravel again, at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive where his ridge had been, and I saw something move across his face that I didn’t expect. It wasn’t anger. It was something closer to confusion, like a man trying to remember something he’d forgotten.
Then he looked at Aunt Ione.
“I didn’t look,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, Ione. I just never looked. I come home off a night shift at seven in the morning and I’m so tired I can’t see straight, and I just get on the tractor and push the lane the way Dad always pushed it. I never once turned around to see where it landed.” He shook his head. “Jessa asked me. Twice. And I just figured, it’s how it’s always been done. Dad pushed it that way forty years, and you never said a word to him.”
Aunt Ione leaned on her shovel and looked at him for a long time. She didn’t say anything at first. Then she took one hand off the shovel and set it on his arm, and her voice when she spoke was very gentle.
“Hollis,” she said. “Your father never left a ridge on my driveway. Not once in forty years.”
Hollis frowned. “He pushed it the same way I do. To the right. I watched him do it my whole life.”
“He did,” Aunt Ione said. “He pushed it to the right. And then every single time, after he finished his lane, he turned that tractor around and came back and cleared the end of my drive. Every storm. Forty years.”
The road was dead silent.
“He’d do his own lane,” Aunt Ione went on, “and push it to the right, because that was the way the wind blew and the way his father pushed it, and the left side drifted worse. And then he’d come back and scoop my ridge out and push it across the road into the ditch. And then he’d park his tractor by my lilacs and come in my back door and have a cup of coffee at my kitchen table.” She paused. “Every storm, Hollis. Every single one. Since 1983.”
Hollis stared at her. “I never knew that.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said. “You were in school. Then you were off working. Then you came home, and he was getting old, and you probably thought he was out checking cattle.” She almost smiled. “He was checking on me.”
Chapter Ten: The Cup on the Hook
She took us all into her kitchen after that. Not the whole road, but Hollis and me. The neighbors drifted back to their houses one by one, Gus and Tess and Merle and the rest, and Darlene drove off in her Jeep to finish her route. Aunt Ione told me to bring Merle’s eggs inside before they froze, and she put a pot of coffee on, and she sat Hollis down at her kitchen table in the chair by the window.
He sat there looking around her kitchen like he’d never seen it before. He probably hadn’t. In forty-four years of living fifty feet away, I don’t think Hollis Brandvold had ever once been inside Aunt Ione’s house.
There was a row of hooks by her back door, the kind you hang coats on. On the last hook, beside her own navy coat and her barn jacket, hung a coffee cup. A big white enamel mug, chipped around the rim, with a faded green John Deere logo on the side.
Aunt Ione took it down off the hook. She washed it in the sink and dried it carefully with a dish towel, and then she filled it with coffee and set it down in front of Hollis.
“That was his cup,” she said. “He kept it here. He said my coffee was better than yours.” She sat down across from him. “It’s been on that hook since the January before he died. The last storm before his stroke.”
Hollis put both his hands around the cup and didn’t drink. He just held it.
“How long?” he asked finally. “Him and you. How long?”
Aunt Ione was quiet for a long time. She looked out her kitchen window, past the lilacs, toward the Brandvold farmhouse a quarter mile up the lane.
“We were sweethearts in high school,” she said. “1959. He gave me a class ring. I still have it in my jewelry box.” She smiled a little. “I went down to Minneapolis for nursing school at Swedish Hospital, and he wrote me every week for two years. And then his father had a heart attack, and Arvid had to take over the farm at nineteen. And there was a girl from church whose family had the land across the road.” She shook her head. “His mother wanted the two farms together. And I was in Minneapolis. And Arvid was nineteen and scared and had a whole farm on his shoulders.”
“He married my mother,” Hollis said quietly.
“He married your mother,” Aunt Ione said. “Marit. She was a good woman, Hollis. I want you to know that. I never once said a bad word about her, and neither did he. They had a good marriage. They had you.” She folded her hands on the table. “I came home in 1964 to take care of my parents, and I lived here fifty feet from them for thirty years, and I was glad for them. I truly was.”
“And the driveway?”
“That started the winter of 1983,” she said. “My father died that November, and I was alone in this house for the first time. The first big storm, Arvid pushed his lane, and I came out in the morning and found a four-foot ridge across my drive. And I stood out there with a shovel crying, because I’d just buried my father, and I couldn’t get my car out to go to work.” She took a breath. “And Arvid saw me from his yard. And he came back with the tractor and cleared it. And he came in for coffee. And he never once left a ridge again.”
“Did my mother know?”
“Your mother knew,” Aunt Ione said. “Marit knew. She used to send pie over with him sometimes. She knew it was just coffee and a clean driveway between two old friends. She died in 2012, God rest her.” She paused. “After that, he’d stay a little longer. That’s all. An hour, maybe, on a storm morning. We’d talk about the weather and the Twins and the price of corn.”
Hollis set the cup down on the table and put his face in his hands.
Chapter Eleven: Forty Years
He sat at Aunt Ione’s kitchen table for a long time without saying anything. I stood at the counter by the coffee pot and didn’t move. Thor the gray cat came in from the living room and jumped up on the empty chair beside him and sat there watching him with yellow eyes.
“I didn’t know,” Hollis said finally, through his fingers. “Forty years. I watched him push that lane every winter. I rode on the tractor with him when I was little. And I never once saw him go back.”
“He didn’t want you to,” Aunt Ione said. “He was a private man, your father. He didn’t want anybody making something of it.”
Hollis took his hands away from his face. His eyes were red. “When he had his stroke,” he said slowly, “and he was in the hospital in Willmar, in those last few days, he kept trying to tell me something. He couldn’t talk right. He kept saying ‘the drive, the drive.’ I thought he meant the tractor. I told him I’d keep it running.” He shook his head. “I told him not to worry, I’d keep pushing the lane just like he did.”
Aunt Ione reached across the table and put her hand on top of his.
“He meant mine,” she said softly. “I expect he meant mine.”
Hollis broke then. He put his head down on Aunt Ione’s kitchen table, right beside his father’s chipped coffee cup, and he cried the way men out here almost never cry, with his whole body. Aunt Ione kept her hand on his and didn’t say anything. She just let him.
I turned around and looked out the window over the sink at the bare gravel at the end of her drive, at the lilacs and the clean lane running up to the Brandvold place, and I had to wipe my own eyes with the back of Dad’s leather glove.
When Hollis finally sat up, he wiped his face on the sleeve of his chore coat and picked up the coffee cup and drank from it, slowly. Then he looked at me standing by the sink.
“Jessa,” he said. “I owe you for the fuel. And your time. And your dad’s loader.” He swallowed. “And for asking me twice, nicely, and me not listening.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“I owe this whole road,” he said. He looked out the window at the cleared driveways. “Every one of them watched you do it. They all saw what I did to Ione’s drive for two winters.” He shook his head. “My dad would have been ashamed of me.”
“Your dad didn’t know you didn’t know,” Aunt Ione said. “He’d have forgiven you. He forgave himself for a lot worse.”
Hollis was quiet for a while. Then he reached into the pocket of his chore coat and took out his wallet, and I thought he was going to try to pay me, and I started to shake my head. But he didn’t take out money. He took out a little folded piece of paper, soft and creased from being carried a long time, and he unfolded it on the table.
It was a list, written in pencil in an old man’s shaky handwriting. Names and addresses. Every house on Brandvold Road.
“I found this in Dad’s tractor,” Hollis said. “In the toolbox, after he died. I never knew what it was. I just kept it.” He smoothed it flat. “Ione’s name is at the top. Then Gus and Ruth. Then Merle. Then the Hagens.” He looked up at us. “He didn’t just do yours, did he, Ione.”
Aunt Ione looked at the list for a long time.
“No,” she said. “He did whoever needed it. After a big storm, he’d go down the road and do whoever couldn’t do their own. The old ones, mostly. Ruth Lindquist when she got sick. Merle after his hip.” She smiled. “Mine was just the first. And the one he stopped for coffee.”
Chapter Twelve: The Next Storm
The next big storm came three weeks later, on a Sunday night in February. Fourteen inches, with wind. It wasn’t as bad as the blizzard, but it was bad enough to close the schools on Monday, which meant I didn’t have to go to the bus garage. I woke up at five-thirty and looked out my window at the snow coming down sideways in the yard light, and I thought about Aunt Ione.
I got dressed and drove out to Dad’s place to get the loader. Dad was up already, sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and his strap, doing his knee exercises. He’d gotten the go-ahead from Dr. Halvorson the week before to start climbing again, carefully.
“You’re going out to Ione’s?” he asked.
“I was going to.”
He looked at me over his coffee cup. “You might want to call her first,” he said.
I didn’t understand. I called her anyway, from Dad’s kitchen. She answered on the second ring, wide awake, and when I said I was coming with the loader, she laughed.
“Don’t bother, honey,” she said. “My drive’s clear. Come have coffee if you want.”
I drove out anyway. It was just getting light when I came around the curve onto Brandvold Road, and the snow had stopped, and the fields were white and blue in the dawn. And at the end of every single driveway on that road, the ridge was gone.
Gus’s drive was clear. Tess’s drive was clear, and her minivan was already gone to work. Merle’s was clear, with a path cut back to his chicken coop. Sonja’s lane was open for the milk truck. All the way down the road, eleven driveways, every one of them scraped down to gravel with the snow pushed off neatly to the side.
And at the end of Hollis’s lane, his old green John Deere was parked beside the lilacs, with its blade down and its engine ticking as it cooled.
I pulled my pickup in at the end of Aunt Ione’s drive. Clear. Scraped to gravel. Not a ridge anywhere. I walked up to her back door and knocked, and she called for me to come in, and I opened the door.
Hollis was sitting at her kitchen table in his chore coat, in the chair by the window, with his father’s chipped white John Deere cup in his hands. Aunt Ione was across from him in her bathrobe, with her own cup and a plate of the egg bake she makes with Merle’s eggs. Thor was asleep on the third chair.
Hollis looked up when I came in. He looked tired, the way a man looks after a night shift and a morning on a tractor in the snow. But he was smiling.
“I got off at seven,” he said. “Pushed my lane to the left. Then I came down and did yours, Ione’s. Then I figured I might as well keep going.” He held up the folded pencil list from his father’s toolbox. “Did the whole road. Took me two hours.”
“He did it the way your grandfather taught me,” Aunt Ione said to me. “Down to gravel, and the snow off to the side where it won’t drift back.”
“I asked Dad’s friend Merle how he used to do it,” Hollis said. “He told me. Then he gave me a dozen eggs.”
Aunt Ione got up and poured me a cup of coffee and set it down at the empty place, and I sat down across from Hollis at her kitchen table, in the warm, with the snow outside the window going gold in the morning sun. For a while nobody said anything. We just drank our coffee and listened to the furnace hum and Thor snore on his chair.
Then Hollis set his cup down on the table, and he looked across at Aunt Ione, and he said something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
“Ione,” he said. “Every storm. As long as I’ve got a tractor.” He looked at the chipped white cup in front of him. “And then I’ll come in for coffee. If that’s all right.”
Aunt Ione looked at him for a long moment, and her eyes were wet, and she smiled the way I haven’t seen her smile since I was a little girl.
“That’s all right, Hollis,” she said. “That’s always been all right.”
When he left that morning, he didn’t take his father’s cup with him. He washed it at her sink and dried it with her dish towel, and then he walked over to the row of hooks by her back door and hung it back up on the last hook, beside her navy coat, where it had hung for forty years. Then he went out the door, and I watched through the kitchen window as he climbed up on his old green tractor beside the lilacs and drove slowly back up his clean lane toward home.
Aunt Ione stood at the window beside me and watched him go too. When he was out of sight, she turned around and looked at the cup on its hook for a long time.
“His father’s hands,” she said softly, almost to herself. “Exactly his father’s hands.”
Then she sat back down at her table, and finished her coffee, and reached for her pencil to check off one more day on the refrigerator calendar, the way she does every morning, carefully, touching each box. Outside, the little red flag on her mailbox stood up straight in the cold sun, waiting for Darlene to come down a clear road.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.