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the snow building up on your roof, watching it in somewhat the reverse manner of a sailor who stands at the bow of a ship watching for shore that never appears. This shore, this landfall, however, is imminent from the first day, draws closer with each hour, each beautiful storm, and finally one day if you have waited too long, you will be startled by the ice-breaking crack of the first timber groaning from deep within the eaves, or the creaking twist—a sound like a big branch snapping from some staunch and upright support.
    These sounds at first aren't the sound of the real thing, timber breaking—it's only the music of the twisting, mounting stress, like the cracking noise your knees or back or elbows make occasionally when stiff—but the sounds do not cease or abate, through the night or into the next day, and soon enough—it can be put off no longer—you are hauling out the long extending ladder, and the snow shovel, and homemade roof rake (a stick of wood nailed crossways to the end of a long, limber pole, which will act as a cross between a long broom and a bulldozer blade), with which you can push large piles of snow over the edge of the roof without having to get too near that edge.
    For safety, and because I have two young daughters, I fasten a rope to the chimney, or double-belay off the frame of a window jamb, though there are souls up here hardier as well as more foolish than I who do not use ropes for this annual activity but instead wade through the drifts of their roofs, on a sixty-degree pitch and steeper, like mountaineers up to their knees in snow; and there are souls up here, hardier and more foolish, who every year slip, in their gathering fatigue, and tumble down that slope and over the edge, falling ten, twenty, sometimes thirty feet or farther. Sometimes they are unhurt, though other times they break legs and arms, ribs and collarbones; and at that point their snow does not get shoveled and they, now one-armed, or one-legged, must depend on the vagaries of the weather—a warming spell, to trickle the snow off drip by drip, and a long stretch of days without new snow—or the kindness of a neighbor to perform for them that back-bending labor, as well as all of winter's many other labors, for at least a few months. And so I use a rope, like a sissy; like a middle-aged man who is trying to relearn daily the return of his limitations, after having been almost entirely free of them for what seems like only a very short while.
    There is a wonderful, purgelike mindlessness to the rhythm of shoveling snow off the roof—pitching it wantonly out over the edge, into the great beyond—listening to the three seconds' silence, and then the soft, sifting
thump
of it landing far below; a feeling of gain, of accumulation, even as the reverse is true, with each patch you clear, methodical and rhythmic, up there on the mountain peak of your home, defending your home, protecting it against the future. It is very much a feeling like that involved with the laying-in of a season's worth of firewood, or more—a feeling of bounty, when what you are doing is ridding yourself of a thing rather than gaining a thing.
    Perhaps the feeling of accumulation comes because you are gaining space, and distance—shoveling your way out of winter's depths, shoveling your way toward spring.
    You lose yourself in it. The sweat on your brow, and down your back, is a kind of currency—you are rich, in this kind of labor, and yet cannot afford to cease—and there is a unique quality to the sweat you evoke, shoveling snow so far above the ground, a different humidity about you and different heat reflecting off the vast white slope of the roof. Your mind rids itself of all images save the color white, and of all movement save for the one, the steady arc of the shovel, again and again.
    The sweat, the salt, continues to bleed out of you. One of those NASA thermal-image-gathering satellites would pass