Last February, Chicagoan Jahmal Cole put out a tweet asking people to help shovel snow for his elderly neighbors. He was stunned (and thankful) when 120 volunteers showed up, including a seventy-year-old woman and a man who traveled there by bus from Indiana.
Jahmal’s volunteer snow shoveling volunteer story made The Washington Post, was listed as one of the Top 10 Kindness Stories of on dailygood.org, and reminded me of another story.
A couple of years ago, I woke up to about a foot of snow. My husband had already left for work early that morning (like 4 o’clock early). I have a disability that makes it difficult to walk on slippery surfaces and nigh impossible to shovel snow, but needed to take our little dog Seamus out for a pee walk. I struggled out the condo door, using my cane with one hand and carrying the dog with the other (Seamus is not a foot tall). My neighbor Charles saw us trying to traverse the snowy hill, grabbed a shovel, and cleared a path for us across the street to the yard where Seamus usually goes. Then he shoveled a patch of snow all the way down to the grass so Seamus could do his business.
I don’t think we were all outside longer than ten minutes, so it probably didn’t seem like a big deal to Charles—in fact, I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten all about his snow-shoveling good deed.
But I haven’t.