When I was little, “snow angels” meant laying down in the snow and moving your arms and legs to make an angel in the snow. I imagine everyone who lives where there is snow has done it. It’s fun, you just can’t help laughing, and you have an angel after! What child – or grown up once they have convinced themselves to lay down in the snow – wouldn’t love that?
At some point, snow angel also came to mean someone who shovels your sidewalk for you. I don’t know when, where, or how it came to be, but it was a brilliant idea. Now there is a snow angel campaign in our city every year, encouraging people to shovel for their neighbours who maybe can’t do it themselves. Maybe they are sick, elderly, or on vacation. Whatever the reason, it is such a treat to find that someone has done the shovelling for you.
We have had snow angels – and we weren’t sick, on vacation, or too old to do it ourselves. They have simply been neighbours – who we didn’t even know – who just decided to do it for us. One snow angel used to come out early and do it before we could. It was like a race between him and my husband to see who could get out there first. And when my husband would win the race, he would shovel their sidewalk as a way of saying thank you for the times he didn’t make it out there first. Our snow angel lived next door, and was very shy. One spring I saw him planting seeds in paper coffee cups and I called over the fence smiling and asking what he was planting. He shyly told me he was planting sunflowers, and sure enough, in the summer there were beautiful sunflowers in the backyard. I had to go out one day while he was shovelling our walk and said thank you as I walked by. I don’t know if he even said anything. He may have just shyly smiled and carried on his way.
This went on for probably two winters. We didn’t know his name, he was just “our snow angel”. We wanted to do something to say thank you, but we knew that he was shy and would be embarrassed, so my husband just kept trying to beat him to it by getting out there first.
One sunny day – I think in the fall – our doorbell rang. It was our snow angel! He had come to tell us that he was moving to another city and wanted to come to say thank you. Not only was he saying thank you, but he brought us chocolate as a token of his appreciation. Merci chocolate. Merci means thank you in French, so it was especially thoughtful. And all I could do was tell him how much we appreciated him shovelling our sidewalk and that it was a pleasure having him as a neighbour. He left, I closed the door, turned around, and looked at my husband, dumbfounded. I genuinely didn’t know what he was thanking us for. He was the one who shovelled our sidewalk. We tried to say thank you but couldn’t as much as we wanted to because we knew he was shy. And now here he was, saying thank you and even bringing us chocolate.
I’m not at a loss for words very often, but I was that day. I posted something about it on social media, and someone said “Well, he was thanking you for being you!” which is lovely, but I still just couldn’t understand it. All we had done was say thank you when we could and I felt like I had intruded asking about what he was planting that day. But obviously he appreciated it. It meant something to him.
The other day my husband got an email from a friend he hadn’t heard from in a long time. His friend was thanking him for being there during a dark time. My husband didn’t know he was going through a dark time. But his friend knew he was only an email away, and it meant something to him.
Once, someone we go to church with thanked me for being there while he was going through a difficult time. He was very emotional. I had no idea that he had been going through something. We said hello, and sat in the same area in church, but never talked about anything personal. But we were there. Literally, all we did was be there, smile, and say hello, goodbye, and have a good week. But it meant something to him.
It’s cliché, but we really don’t know what others are going through. We don’t know what our hello, our smile, might mean to them. So let’s be kind.
Let’s be snow angels.