“Time to go to school Jason!” my mom said in a slightly annoyed voice for having to wake up. I woke up, my body feeling twice heavier than usual. I rubbed my eyes and looked up at my mom standing in the doorway, shovel in hand.

I rubbed my eyes again. Was this part of a dream? My mom was wearing a puffy black jacket that was zipped up to her neck and black leather gloves that looked as thick as a blanket. Her white snow pants were tucked firmly into the top of her fur-lined boots. I, still in disbelief, asked her, “what are you doing?”

    “We need to shovel the snow out of the way so you can go to school!” she replied urgently.

She left abruptly leaving one plastic shovel behind expecting me to follow her. I thought briefly for a moment that this couldn’t be true, but reluctantly I peeled the blanket exposing myself to the cold air. I quickly changed into my winter wear, slapped on some gloves, and headed out.

As I walked out the door I felt a cold breeze send goosebumps prickling up my arms. I dragged my body that felt like it was 200 pounds to shovel cold white snow.

Pointing with her shovel towards the sidewalk, “I’ll get the right you get the left!” she said waving her shovel back and forth like a clock. My body felt like a rock not because I was muscular, but because I just woke up. I craved to just go back to the warm cozy bed, however, I knew that I couldn’t let my mom do all the work. “Mom, my back hurts” I complained to my mom knowing that I was just lazy.

“Let's stretch then!” Mom replied in an enthusiastic voice.

My mom and I started stretching together before we started shoveling the snow to go to school. We started to rotate our upper bodies left and right. A cracking sound escaped from my spine that was loud enough to go through the thick winter jacket and into my mom’s ears. She turned around and raised an eyebrow at the sound. I was very surprised at how satisfying stretching was. My body wasn’t stiff anymore, it was smooth and light like a falling snowflake.

Feeling more alert, I gripped my shovel and walked confidently to the sidewalk. I started jokingly shoveling all the cold snow that was on my side to my mom’s side. It didn’t last long, she caught me as my first shovel full hit the sidewalk. We giggled at each other and my mom made a snowball and threw some at me. I quickly turned my back towards the flying snowball and felt it splashing everywhere on my jacket. Small flakes of snow made their way inside my jacket and lodged against my skin.

Reaching down immediately, I made a snowball of my own to fire back. But my snowball flew well over her head and splattered against my neighbor’s kitchen window. We stood as frozen as icicles waiting to see if our cranky neighbors would come out. After a few moments of tense silence, we put our heads down and went back to shoveling, pretending to be innocent.

Being from Southern California, I had never tasted snow, and the more I shoveled, the more I wanted to bite into the soft white piles. I imagined it was going to taste like smooth water, but as the cold snow touched my tongue I flinched immediately. It was much colder than I had expected. At first it wasn’t too bad, but after a second my mouth was full of the taste of exhaust. It felt like I stuck my tongue into a car’s tailpipe. I spit out the snow and my mom laughed at me again. “Jason is that your breakfast?” she said while smiling at me. “We’re going to eat breakfast after this.”

“We’re almost there!” I yelled with joy. My grip got tighter as glimpses of speckled sidewalk appeared through the snow. My plastic shovel collided with the cement and sounded like nails on a chalkboard. However, I didn’t mind at all because it meant we were nearly done. I looked around at the hip high pile of snow I had created, proud of what I was able to accomplish in just twenty minutes. Despite the cold New England weather, beads of sweat dripped from the back of my hair down my neck and my shirt was glued to my skin. But I wasn’t tired, instead the excitement of finishing pumped new adrenaline into my body.  

“Finally! There is no snow now” I shouted. Joyfully, I threw the cold plastic shovel into the snow. I rushed over to my mom and she gave me a warm hug that made me forget about the cold breeze and she said “Time to go to school Jason.”