Zen and the art of shoveling snow

There’s about a hundred and fifty feet of driveway between the road and the house. We’re having what the locals call a “hard winter” in these parts, and I’ve been spending a lot of time shoveling snow. When I bought the place almost twenty years ago, my father gifted me an old Ford 4000 with a snow-blower attachment. The trouble with that was, it was too efficient for its own good. That little tractor comes with a sturdy 53 hp diesel engine. Those can be fussy in winter. You need to keep them plugged in, and once fired up they should warm up properly before doing any work. You’re into twenty minutes of dinking around before you actually blow the snow, which takes about 45 seconds down the drive and another 45 seconds back up. In a minute and a half you’re done, and then, just to preserve the integrity of the mechanicals, you should let it idle for a few minutes before shutting it off. Being a younger and less patient man twenty years ago, I chafed at all that wasted time. I’d never owned a snow-blower, mainly because I’d only had conventional two-car-lengths driveways, and until relatively recently, say the last thirty years or so, it would never occur to anybody that they needed anything other than a snow shovel to clear that drive. But now I’m in the country, and I’ve got a serious driveway, so I took the plunge and splurged on a super-duper Toro with heated handle-bars and power steering! No shit! Who can even imagine such a thing! Actually, when you drive through town these days, everybody with any driveway at all seems to have a snow-blower, and given suburban lust for the newest and best, heated hand-grips and power steering are probably old news by now. Be that as it may, I nevertheless enjoyed the next two years of mild winters wherein my new Toro had seen maybe ten hours of use. Towards the end of the third winter, also a mild one, it suddenly developed an urge to run at full throttle no matter what you did to the throttle lever. I made a mental note to look after that during the summer. During the summer I forgot all about it. I mean, who thinks about their snow-blower in the summer? Get a life! Or at least get a boat! Anyway, it’s late November and we finally get a decent dump of snow, and all of a sudden I am reminded of this full-throttle issue. By now I’m retired. It doesn’t really matter if the lane is cleared in two minutes or twenty minutes… or by noon! So I bought a snow shovel. The next summer I dismantled the throttle linkage on the Toro. Not complicated – just a few springs and screws and brackets. I set them aside in an orderly way and then forgot about them. That was three years ago. Now we’re into this hard winter, and yesterday it took me three hours to shovel the snow from the house to the road. It was a beautiful experience. I’m savvy to the fact that heart-attack-while-shoveling-snow is a leading cause of death in my cohort, so I take lots of breaks, just to lean on the shovel and admire the scenery. And it was spectacular! In the ebb and flow of an ongoing blizzard, the skies were a kaleidoscope of greys and blues and silvers and whites, and the cold air was pure, without the taint of fuel fumes. It was a beautiful thing!