The best laid plans of mice and men go often awry – Robert Burns, Scottish poet (paraphrased)
If there’s one thing that can be said about the job of a small-town newspaper editor, it’s that . . .
week to week, the work is never the same. A single day might involve requesting information from the local health authority, taking in a performance at the local high school and chasing after fire trucks headed to an accident. Sure there are events that repeat annually or even more frequently, but even then, it’s impossible to know what’s going to happen.
Some weekends, events seemingly arise from the ether of social media and there’s hardly enough hands on deck to cover all the bases. For those that don’t know, THE EQUITY only has one reporter on duty any given weekend, who covers anywhere from Breckenridge to Danford Lake to Sheenboro, along with every hamlet in between.*
Other weekends, like the one that just passed, four of five events get cancelled due to the atrocious weather, putting the makeup of the week’s paper in jeopardy.
I made the mistake of cursing Old Man Winter in these pages last year, resulting in a hellacious snowstorm in the spring that I still feel responsible for, so I will refrain from repeating my error. But I will say that had I stayed indoors with the curtains closed, I would have been in a better frame of mind than I am after witnessing (and driving in) the vulgar combination of precipitation that blanketed this region only days ago.
I cursed the entire cast of the movie Frozen as I brushed off my car just so I could begin chiselling away at the husk of ice it was entombed in, to then scoop up the mound of snowplow residue at the end of the driveway. That’s one of the fun features of shovelling snow, there’s usually a big pile of soggy crap shunted off the road and onto your driveway, like a final hurdle for your vehicle to plow through or break itself upon.
Returning to my apartment on Sunday afternoon, ice and hard-packed snow had walled off my parking space, and I wasn’t about to annihilate a bumper that I’d already had to replace once by trying to force the issue. I found a spot to park and began chipping away at it with my shovel.
I looked up when I heard a roar and saw lights flashing in the street. Low and behold, it was my neighbour driving a backhoe. I took a step back and gave him a wave as he scooped up the pile I had been picking away at, and in the time it took me to put my shovel away he managed to clear my entire parking spot.
You never know what you’re going to get in this life. Some days you gotta make due with a shovel but every once in a while your neighbour will show up out of the blue with heavy machinery. Well, that’s the lesson I took from it anyways.
*Editor’s note: apologies to our readers in the Swisha, we don’t see enough of you. I hope to make the trek out of Quebec, through Ontario and back into Quebec sometime this year.
Caleb Nickerson
