The January walk before the bus

The front steps and the walk are shoveled clear after an overnight snow, before the school bus comes. The snow stopped in the deep part of the night, and the air has not warmed since. The house is dark, the streetlight on the corner is still on, and the snow has the dry, squeaky grain of a January freeze. Whoever has the job comes out in boots and a coat pulled over a flannel shirt, carrying a flat shovel and a bucket of sand. The bus will turn onto the street while the sky is still between night and morning, and the walk needs to be bare by then.

The first cut

The threshold is the last place the door will shut against the cold, so that is where the shovel goes in first. The edge of the blade is knocked against the crust where the snow meets the door sill, a thin line of white that has blown in under the door in the night. The shoveler scrapes it back, then uses the flat of the blade to push a small apron of snow out onto the top step. The first sound is the grate of the shovel on wood and then on the step, a sound that carries in the still air. When the door can close without dragging, the first cut is done.

The steps

From the top step down, the work goes sideways. The shovel is set at one side of a tread and pushed across, taking a thin layer of snow in front of it. Each push ends with a toss over the edge, so the snow falls onto the already-cleared walk or into the yard. The treads are narrow, so the shovel does not turn; it scrapes until the concrete or wood shows through. When all the steps are done, the line of each tread is visible, with a steep white edge left against the risers. Sand comes later; for now the steps are only bare.

The walk

The walk gets the second sweep. The shoveler starts at the bottom step and works toward the street, pushing the snow forward rather than throwing it. The blade rides on the surface of the concrete, and the scrape tells the shoveler whether the walk is bare or still iced. A good pass takes the snow down to a thin smear of white that can be brushed with the edge. The width of the cleared path is a little more than a shovel blade, so a person carrying a lunchbox and a backpack can pass without brushing the banks. On a wide walk, the shoveler makes two passes, one on each side, leaving a single seam of snow down the middle to be pushed away with the next pass.

The apron

Where the walk meets the street, the plow has made a solid bank. The shoveler cuts into it with the corner of the shovel, chopping the bank into blocks and lifting them onto the lawn. The cut has to be level with the curb, because the bus stops at the end of the walk and no one steps off a six-inch ledge. If the bank is too hard to chop, the shoveler leaves a flatter slope of snow that will be stamped down by boots. When the cut is done, the walk makes a clean, continuous surface from the door to the asphalt.

The ice

What is left on the steps and the walk is not snow but ice. The shoveler goes back over the whole line, scraping at the thin clear patches where the snow has melted and frozen again. The edge of the shovel catches the high spots and flakes them off, leaving a darker, wet-looking surface. Then the sand goes down. A fistful from the bucket is thrown onto each step and a line of it along the walk. The sand is not meant to melt the ice; it is meant to sit on top of it, to give a boot sole something to bite into. Where the ice is too thick to scrape, the sand is thrown on thick enough to hide the shine.

The throw

The snow from the walk and the steps has to go somewhere, and the somewhere is chosen with March in mind. It is thrown onto the grass, away from the walk and away from the street. It is never thrown onto the street, where the plow will shove it back, and never into the low spot at the corner of the house, where it will freeze into a slab and then melt into the walk in March. The shoveler tosses it in a low, flat pile on an open part of the lawn that gets the afternoon sun. A low pile melts sooner than a tall bank, and a pile in the sun will be gone by March, leaving mud, not a lump of ice.

The last pass

With the snow moved, the shoveler looks back at the walk. The bare path is the same color as it was on a dry day in November: gray concrete, light wood, a scatter of sand in the treads. The shovel is leaned against the porch rail, and the bucket of sand is left on the top step in case the walk refreezes before the bus comes. The walk runs bare to the street, with sand in the treads of the steps.