What follows is not true.  It does not have a “point.”  It is a story, and as stories go, I suppose it is intended to be enjoyable.  I was growing tired of blogging with a “point.”  Perhaps tomorrow I will write something with a “point.”  “Points” are wearisome, aren’t they?  I feel as if they should always be “wrapped up in quotation marks.”  All is meaningless; have a great, pointless and enjoyable day!

In my homeland round about this time of year, the obituaries began to run together, especially as the Winter weather eclipses Spring.  There are the few days of hope, maybe a day in the upper thirties.  But that day is followed by the doldrums of a two week cold-snap, where the sun tricks hearty, old Norwegians and stoic Swedes into believing the meteorologist might be wrong.

“I can feel it in my knees,” they say, “the weather is changing today.”  And so, with a heart bursting with expectation old men put on their boots and shovel the new layer of snow from their driveway.  On that sanguine day, the day of assumption, it is no longer “that damned covering of God’s forsaken territory” they shovel.  It is just snow; and, as it relates to God, it is his final, gentle gift of winter.  That is all; it is not a great curse.

But the knees, they lie to the heart.  The arthritis that is so often the great predictor sends the fallacious signal, which is only rightly interpreted on the third consecutive day of snowfall.  The Norwegian and sometimes Lutheran man with the arthritic knees is reminded of that old wisdom scripture, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”  This is true, but he does not realize the extent of the truth.  His blood pressure boils with the delaying melt.  Boils beyond what 19 blue cans of Stroh’s in a fishhouse is able to subdue.

Hoisting his shovel up over the December and January snowbanks in his yard, he feels the betrayal severely, and he thinks of his grown children: the son who has been relocated to Arizona by his employer, the middle-son who lives in an apartment in Minneapolis and has never so much as dusted off his windshield.  He goes from underground parking to a covered ramp.  No shoveling.  No scraping.  And then there is the daughter, who lives outside of Denver.  She relishes the snow.  Loves it.  Writes about it for a magazine which no one reads, Ski Bum Quarterly – a free periodical for the perpetually care-free.  She lives under a hut fashioned from used snowboards, insulated with the clothing of Texans who accidentally leave their gear behind, strewn about the mountain face from their end-over-end lessons on edges and on gravity.  “Seems the whole state takes an annual trip to ski Loveland,” she once wrote.

He thinks about these things, about his children, whom he once loved so dearly, the betrayal of it all.  Their insensitivity to the plight of the rural Minnesotan.  Oh, how his heart is sick.  And that is when it happens.  The tightness; it was just a normal scoop of snow, maybe a little bigger than usual, tossed over a drift slightly higher than it was yesterday.

His head is filled with last words, his wife, Judy, who said, “Don’t over-do it, honey.”  She was still in her bathrobe at 6:30, searching for her cigarettes.  Those would be her final words to him.  “Don’t over-do it.”  And, “Feed your dog.”  He hears those words in an echo as he falls to his arthritic knees, the lying knees, the failing, lying knees.  He hadn’t fed the dog, and wondered if his sweet wife would figure that out, or if he’d go hungry until tomorrow. In fact those were his final words, “Feed the dog.”  No one heard them.

The deferred hope has won out, and the obituary reads, “Died of heart complications on Wednesday; he was 56 years old.”  Few understand how true the term “heart complications” can ring.  It continues, “He passed from this life into the next while shoveling his driveway so that his adoring wife, Judy, could go to the store to buy more cigarettes.  Survived by his wife and his three children who live ‘anywhere but here’ (and have never shoveled snow).”

Meanwhile, the man stands before God, who questions him about his language as it pertains to Minnesota Winters.  The man looks sheepish and apologetic.  God says, “Say three Hail Mary’s, and all is absolved.”

“You’re Catholic?”

“Nah, I just thought since you were an occasional Lutheran you’d appreciate the irony.”

“Oh,” the man says in the way his people have said their “O”s for centuries, “Anyhow, sorry about the language; you ever spent a Winter in Minnesota?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty brutal,” the man advises.

“That’s what I hear.  I fish on Mille Lacs on Opener,” then God reverently bowed his head for a moment, an action the man found both strange and appropriate, “but I winter in Texas.  I do spend a week with some of the saints skiing at Loveland in Colorado.  You should come next year.”

“The locals hate that, you know.”

“Yes, well, ‘the trying of your faith produces patience’ and all that.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“I met your daughter there.  Gave her a stocking cap with huge pink, fabric spikes sticking out of the crown.  I wore it on a dare; it was the dumbest looking hat I’d ever seen.”

“What do you do in March?”

“Cribbage and some Hymns until Easter.”

“Of course.”

Back on earth, Judy, the wife of the now-deceased, gave up smoking in honor of her late husband, and with his life insurance money, she bought a snow blower.  She lived to be 84.  She died peacefully at her home, drinking weak coffee.