Ahh, the sun did come out today! Good thing, since I saw neither hide nor hair of a snow plow. I did see my neighbors, though, early this morning, dutifully shoveling snow and slush from the section of the roadway directly in front of their houses, and piling it at their curbs. I was not so amazed at this organized community response to Mother Nature. The biannual neighborhood leaf cleanup has demonstrated just how willing individuals are to work together for the common good. No, what truly surprised me was how many people own a shovel! Why in the world do my Japanese neighbors need shovels? Not one of them has a yard more than 24 inches wide. They aren’t using shovels to relocate dumptruck loads of landscaping materials from the driveway out front to flowerbeds in the back forty, because there are neither flowerbeds nor a back forty. Any planting they do is generally in a flower box and can be accomplished with a garden trowel, or probably an old tablespoon. They have no room to dig a grave for the beloved family pet, or any need to dig holes for fences or mailbox posts. They can’t be using them to whack vermin—if they tried to swing a shovel overhead, they’d put it through the neighbor’s window. And despite the evidence on the street this morning, this area does not normally accumulating snowfalls. So why all the shovels?
Alas, all of our shovels are in storage somewhere in Virginia, so my section of street remained a slushy mess for the junior high students trekking to school and the housewives schlepping non-burnables and PET bottles to the gomi pile. Luckily the sun quickly removed all indications of my inability to be a team player—by noon the only snow left on the whole block was what my industrious neighbors had piled up with their shovels this morning.
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