Snow job

Our backyard window was piled high with snow last week. School was cancelled and I was staying in to take care of my kid. But my wife asked me to shovel so she could walk out to get to work. What happened next had never happened to me before. 

The snow behind our car was about a meter deep. My neighbour had shoveled a pile on the street that blocked half my way out. And the City’s snowplows had blocked me entirely with a wall of ice and slush. I partially took out the FOB from my pocket to open the trunk. I took my shovel out, closed the trunk, and started working.

The snow was very light, so I shoveled as fast as a snow blower just tossing that snow to one side but there was a ton and I had to work extra fast. After catching my breath, I walked to the front of the house to get the pathway done.

“I’m finished!” My wife was happy. She left for work, and by then, I had to take my kid to swim lessons. I got ready and went to get my keys. They weren’t in their usual place. Maybe I had misplaced them, so I searched the house. 

What happened to them?

We missed swim practice and I spent the rest of the evening looking for them all over the house, in every corner. Absolutely nothing. Maybe I had locked them in the trunk? Or I had dropped them on the sidewalk, and someone picked them up? I went back out to look.

Nothing.

The next day, CAA came out to open the trunk. They weren’t there.

I panicked. My house keys, business keys, and car keys were all in that bunch. They even had a Swiss army knife attached to them. I went out again and no sign of those keys. How could two pounds of keys just disappear? 

I had lost them in just two places, in front of the house or the back of the car. I called my wife. She said to relax and meditate. She was confident I would find them. I was not. I went out there to the icy silence with two shovels, a toboggan, and a metal detector.

I started in the front. The metal detector went off a lot. On the metal clamps holding up the fence between us and the neighbours. On metal screws on the porch. On the bare concrete. I guess metal pipes near the surface? But the detector never went off in the snow. 

I was reading Don Quixote just before this happened and thought, oh no, I am as crazy him, going out tilting at windmills. Only I was tilting at snow mountains, believing I would find my keys under there.

I sat on my frozen porch thinking about my misguided adventure. All seemed lost. So, I started talking to myself. I was going to find those keys and move mountains to do it. Mountains of snow.

The next day, I got started again. This time with a new resolve to find the keys at the back, by the car. I used the metal detector again. It kept going off. It seems there’s a lot of metal in the soil, and in the rocks in the driveway.  

I shovelled and shovelled and shovelled some more. I broke ice to clear the area. I filled the sled and used the metal detector to inspect each load before walking the sled to the backyard and dumping it there. I did this for hours.

The City’s solid wall of ice, slush and snow on the street was the worst.

I piled one sled more and without testing it with the metal detector, dumped it in the backyard. I was ready to call it quits. I did one last sled full of ice and snow.  And because it would be the last one before giving up, I used the metal detector. It started going off. I wasn’t convinced. 

It had gone off many times in the driveway. This time though, the metal detector was going off on the plastic sled. I couldn’t see anything but ice and snow. So, I put my hand into that heap and pulled out my keys.

I could not believe my own eyes. I clutched my keys and kept them in the air for a while. I had to let the impossible reality sink in. After three straight days of searching, I had found them deep in a snow pile.

A miracle.

When I told my neighbour Joel that I was going to search the snow for my keys, and that I would need a miracle to find them. He said calmly, “miracles do happen.”

He was right.