I was eight months pregnant in January of 1977. My husband was in western Canada for a week. This was my third child, not my first. We'll be fine, I told him.
And we were. We were better than fine.
It began snowing two days after he left - thick, fat flakes that drifted and covered the rail fence in the front yard, that sat upright on telephone lines, that turned the neighbors' roofs white and the world, all we could see of it, into a giant snow globe.
My children cheered. They were 5 and 7 and school was canceled. They sat on the couch in their pajamas, wrapped in blankets, not arguing, not even poking one another - just watching cartoons and eating an Entenmann's Raspberry Danish Twist.
We lived on junk food then. I made pancakes with chocolate chips and chocolate chip cookies and then I sat and watched TV, too. And the day dawdled by.
In the early afternoon the snow stopped and the sun appeared in a clear blue sky and the white landscape glinted silver in some places and gold in others, shimmering as if dusted with sparkles.
The kids put on their coats and boots and I put on my husband's jacket, because mine wouldn't button, and out we went to play and maybe shovel a bit.
In those days we shared a snowblower with the man across the street. He and my husband bought it together, but it lived in our garage. This man did his driveway first and then my husband did ours.
The across-the-street driveway was more than half cleared when the kids and I started to shovel ours. The snow was a foot high and deeper in drifts. So it wasn't easy. We unearthed the car and made a dent in the snow behind it. But most of the time we spent throwing snow at each other - it was too light and fluffy for snowballs - and sprawling in the front yard and making snow angels.
By the time the man, who long ago moved away, returned the snowblower, we were back working on getting the car out. It was slow going. I think sometimes that maybe this man didn't know that my husband was out of town, or that he didn't realize the snowblower was too heavy for me to use, or that he wasn't aware that I was very, very pregnant.
Because he wheeled the snowblower into the garage, nodded to the kids, smiled at me, and then went home.
We went inside, too, to get warm.
A while later, I told the kids, "I'm going back out."
We have a big driveway, and even though the snow was light, there was a lot of it.
I have a picture in my head, even now, all these years later, of looking up and squinting, the snow bright, and seeing my son, my little boy, his blue knit hat pulled over his ears, his mittens mismatched, his coat wide open, because he was never cold, not then, not now, carrying a shovel bigger than he was, walking out of the garage and coming to my rescue.
We cleared the driveway together, one shovelful at a time. It took a long time, so long that when we finished the man across the street had turned on his outside light.
I remembered all this Monday when it snowed, though the snow was heavy, not light, and there was no sun, only clouds; though my boy is a man now, a husband and a father.
I remembered because there I was in the same spot, shoveling the same driveway. And I was thinking how he is the same, too, open coat, open heart. And how this story defines him.
Last winter, I drove to the train station to pick him up. He lives in New York and came home just for a day. And there he was carrying the backpack and suitcase of a woman, a stranger - holding the door for her, helping her with her toddler, then waiting with all of her things while she retrieved her car and paid for parking.
It was a cold night and he wasn't wearing a coat and all this took about 15 minutes. When the woman returned, he didn't rush away. He put her luggage in the trunk, collapsed her stroller, and fit it in the back, while she strapped her child in a car seat.
He wasn't wearing a hat or mittens or dragging a shovel twice his size. But I saw the boy in him, still, and sat in my car and smiled.
Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com. Listen to Beverly read and talk about her columns in her weekly podcast at boston.com/news/podcasts.
