Thomas R. Moore

I strip the porch roof, pick out the used nails, and toss the shingles down onto a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled my grandmother's roof fifty years ago: the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and ladders all the same, but level now with hemlock limbs instead of locust. I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel and drive the old nails home, slide another shingle into place, pound, toes bent, knees creaking.Miserliness, a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it caring, thinking of the man who gave us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat- house full of boats. The only time I saw him he was at his work bench, a rich man straightening nails, moving from the bent can to the anvil to the straight.

After snowstorms my father shoveled the driveway where it lay open to a sweep of wind across a neighbor’s field, where the snow drifted half way down to the paved road, before snow-blowers, before pick-ups cruised the streets with THE BOSS lettered on red plows. He heated the flat shovel in the woodstove till the blade steamed, like Vulcan at his furnace removing the dross, then rubbed a hissing candle on the steel so the snow would slide unchecked as he made each toss. He marked blocks with the waxed blade, lifted and tossed, lifted and tossed again, squaring off against the snow.