Okay, another try. This time less elegant, more information. Two evenings ago my mother said we were going to get two centimeters an hour overnight. Now the windowsill corners harbour distinguished white layers. 

There is a story of my father tucking me into bed. I am young enough to still be a girl. I ask him why he doesn’t understand me, if he too was a child once. He says it was a long time ago. I replay that memory now and I am not myself, I am my father.

I’m shovelling the driveway with him today. We need adults so there is more than one person to pick up the shovels when it snows. My back hurts and I think of you, how used to this kind of work you are. My father comes over and says, “It seems like it’ll never be done and then you keep going and eventually it is.” 

I say, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and he thinks that’s great. He still thinks it’s great when I tell him it’s Camus.

When I was in elementary school they often put on animated Canadian short films. I did not understand the snow shoes and red plaid flannels and hockey. I did not want to be from anywhere, I was from me. Back then a large part of winter was the piles of snow towering beside driveways and sidewalks, carved paths only wide enough for one. In February my friends and I huddled under the concrete awning and kicked slush into square piles, taking turns crushing them under our boots. There is a wet kind of cold, mittens that don’t dry in pockets fast enough to be any good before you need them again. The snow swallows sound. I thought I had grown better at dealing with winter the last few years but I see now that winter had gone away, leaving something dry and flat in its place.

I was shoveling again today. I think of you as I’m shoveling the neighbors’ walkway, how simple you make it seem to be kind. In a life so close I can hear it we are moving the snow together. And every time we are almost done one of us smiles to the other and says, “Come on, let’s just do that bit of sidewalk over there,” because the work is the life and the life is a game and we make each other want to play.

I stop for a moment next to the house leaning on the plastic shovel. A man walks by carrying a diet Coke in a plaid flannel. A red one. I think I want to be part of this. 

Like bottom dwellers in the ocean, air is our medium. Minerals fall from the sky like silt in a riverbed and we push it into channels like ants. What has to happen for you to admit there is something here, what will it take to convince you? 

My mother brings a pile down to me and I say, “Yesterday I told Dad ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy.’” 

“Yeah, that’s great. He told me last night.”

“He did? Did he tell you it’s by Camus?”

“Who’s Camus again?”

I gather my limited knowledge of absurdist philosophy. She likes me to spell things out so I end up saying, “They think you are like Sisyphus, doing all of this endlessly for no reason, and they want you to be content with it,” then we talk about something she wants to talk about. 

I’ll take it. If you’re not sold on God, I’ll take it. You don’t have to see the pattern but please, keep making it with me. 

I am not quite ready yet but sometime in the next few years a red plaid flannel will float into my life and become mine. And my children will play hockey and I will be proud to live here.