Small Expectations (an Everyday Essay)

winter multiple exposure (Diana F+)

This post is part of the "Everyday Essays" series. See below for a description of the series, and read others essays here.

From the warm corner of the couch I see the girl tromp her way to my front door. She's suited up for the snow in black snow pants, boots, a pink-and-black checkered jacket. Her shoulder-length brown hair frames her face under her dark, knitted ski cap. She knocks. I answer. The girl looks to be about 11 or 12, but I'm not always the best judge of age in kids. 

"Would you like me to shovel your driveway?" she asks.

I look at her and her shovel (is it kid-sized?), and then at my driveway, long and wide. She is earnest and confident. I imagine her snowboarding down a mountain. She looks like a girl who would snowboard. She looks like the kind of girl I'd like to have been. The kind of girl I'd like to be.

"Sure," I say. "How much?

"Hmm... five or ten bucks?" She shrugs one shoulder, like it's no big thing.

"Okay."

"Okay, I'll knock on your door when I'm done."

From the window, I watch her push the shovel into the five inches of snow covering my driveway. I watch her slip backward just a bit, the bulk of the snow against the shovel making her lose her footing. She's too small to do this whole thing, I think.

I open the door again and tell her just to do the left side so I can get the little Honda up it. I tell myself we can leave the right side snowy, since our SUV is sturdy enough to navigate it.

"Just the left side? Okay," she says.

She keeps shoveling. She picks up steam. The girl's a champ. I look up again and see her taking a thirty-second breather, propping up her wrists on the shovel's handle, staring up at the sky, her back to my house. What is she thinking about? Will she use this money for a ski trip? To buy Christmas presents? Does she know I'm watching her from this side of the glass? From this side of childhood?

She clears off the left side in no time and I realize that I underestimated her. I think about telling her to go ahead and do the whole thing, but I feel too guilty.

As promised, she knocks again, and I hand her a plastic zip-top baggie filled with a five dollar bill, a one, and four dollars in quarters. I'm out of bills, but I have plenty of quarters. I could have paid her fifteen if she'd done the whole driveway.

Instead, I just say, "Thanks!"

She leaves, and I wonder: Would I have told her to clear just the one side if she'd been a boy?

An hour later, when I'm sure she's not in the neighborhood to see me, I go out and shovel the right side myself. If she can do it, so can I.

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About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.