The Healing Journey

January 10, 2026

“Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.”
— Andy Goldsworthy

It was the first snowfall of the year, and it was only the beginning of January. But it was nothing like when he was a kid so long ago, and it seemed to snow week after week after week, until the snow piled up to the bottoms of the window sills when it fell off the roof of their house in a place called Pine Rock Park.

And every snowfall had its downside because he had to join his mother and father and their neighbors to shovel off their long driveway that led up the hill their house was on. It was a steep hill and with every storm, a dozen or more neighborhood kids would sled down it. But he wasn’t with them because he was shoveling that torturously long driveway with a flat-faced steel shovel that he had to swing over a concrete wall because there was nowhere else to put the snow. It was a lot of work for a kid, and after two hours of shoveling, he was too tired to go sledding.

Those were the years before aluminum snow shovels and snow blowers … and they couldn’t afford to have it plowed.

Now, years later, he was still shoveling his own driveway alone. His parents were gone, there were no neighbors to help and he had no son to assist him. It was hard work. He hoped his parents and the neighbors were looking down at him from up there where you didn’t have to shovel snow, and he hoped they had a little sympathy for him.

In that moment outside alone, he missed them all. They were gone and now he only had the memory of those rugged winters as a kid.
©J Pisani

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