Shoveling Snow

I love the snow. I know I have said it before but I really do enjoy everything about snow. When I was a teenager, I worked as a Janitor for Snow College. I had started at thirteen with my older sister. We went into work every night from ten til midnight even on school nights. My sister and I were each assigned a building to clean. I was responsible for the science building with all of its taxidermied animals in a case along the wall of the main floor. The science building was three stories tall and my job was to start at the top and sweep out all of the classrooms to the hallway, sweep all of the hallways and then mop the hallways. Along with this I had to wipe down all of the chalk boards, take out the trash from all of the receptacles (professors would leave their trash bins outside of their office doors in the hall), and clean and restock all of the bathrooms. The chalk boards had six surfaces that would slide up and down as they were used. Occasionally there would be a note on one of the boards to please not erase as it was a math proof that was being solved. Those proofs usually took up three or four of the surfaces available. I constantly wondered what they were trying to solve as I was only thirteen and I didn't understand these advanced equations. When I got older I would come to loath these proofs. A teacher could assign for homework just one or two problems and it would take hours to complete. As I got older I continued to be a janitor and come in every night but in the winter time I was asked to work a little more. The daily janitorial staff showed up to work around six every morning but if it snowed they would show up at four in the morning. The main janitor had a list of additional workers needed to shovel the snow. I and my two younger brothers became a crew. My mom would get a call about four thirty in the morning and she would come in and wake us up. We all shared a bedroom so it was an easy thing to do. We would all get up and dressed then go down stairs and grab our coats, gloves and hats and head out the door. We were usually assigned to work the west campus of the college so we would start walking the four blocks to get to our area. We were asked to show up by five and clear the sidewalks. We never had any supervision and we always worked together. We grabbed the shovels from where they would leave them next to the building and get to work. If there was only an inch or two the work went quickly with each of us taking a walkway and just pushing the snow to the other end. There were hundreds of yards of sidewalk on the west campus so if we were feeling spry we would even run as we pushed the snow. If there were more than three inches, and sometimes we had more than a foot of snow, we would walk together one in front of the other. I would usually be last in line. The first brother would clear the middle of the sidewalk and the other brother and myself would push the snow off of the edges of the walk at an angle. This was always easiest when there was too much snow to do the walk on ones own. Sometimes it was still snowing when we started so we would shovel once in one direction and then have to come back the other direction and shovel again. If the snow was really bad or if they needed additional help on the main campus they would let us know and we would walk the five blocks up to the main campus and we would shovel up there. It was a lot harder at the main campus because there were a lot more stairs that had to be shoveled. To do the stairs one would start at the top and work down to the bottom. The challenge was that as one got closer to the bottom of the stairs the more snow one was having to shovel. Once the two hours were up we were usually sweating in our coats from all of the work and starving from the lack of breakfast. with two hours of work in we would trudge back home we had to get our own driveway shoveled before we went inside to eat.