We’ve owned our home for about five years now, and for five years I have managed to avoid shoveling. Had managed, until last week.

This was partly weather-related — we just haven’t had that much snow — but also strategic. Long before I met Eric I decided that I needed to be with a man who takes initiative to shovel snow. This was a belief borne from one particular observation, from a time at a funeral when one man in a roomful of people sitting in grief-stricken silence announced that he was going to go outside and clear a path. Then he did it. It was a welcome distraction. Everyone turned their attention to watching the shoveling, and the mood in the room took a palpable shift, from despair to optimism. We weren’t going to be frozen in grief forever. We were going to be OK.

To be clear, I wasn’t otherwise interested in that shoveler, but this was the kind of behavior I decided I was looking for in a partner, the ability to identify the right moment to volunteer to perform heroic acts of utility. Over the years I’d had too many entanglements with men who would wait for someone else to dig them out (literally, figuratively). It was a simple metric, easy for me to look at someone sitting across from me at a table in a Brooklyn bar, to envision him in the middle of a blizzard and know: not this guy.

It was August when I met Eric, a few years after the funeral. The weather was hot, but somehow I could tell right away that he had that quality. I just needed to wait for some snow. My hunch was borne out the following January when he took the initiative to clear the steps of the brownstone where I rented an apartment. Not his responsibility: the landlord’s; my landlord’s. But Eric did it.

A shoveler, and a dependable one, until last week when a bad cold beset him and I had to do it, scooping and hauling and cursing the fact that had a record-breaking snowfall not cancelled my flight, I would be enjoying the antiseptic pleasures of a California business hotel. There was just so much of it, huge white piles. Excessive!

Those familiar with the plot of my first memoir will be aware that I grew up and was educated in wintry climes — upstate New York, and then Quebec — but in all that time I chose not to develop any competence in snow removal. How spoiled! I let my dad and brother do it, and then I lived in rented apartments, I never owned a car. Last week as I whacked at the drifts I recalled how my father would try to help me with my high school algebra homework, an activity that brought us both, usually a very peaceable duo, to a state of peak conflict across the kitchen table.

I’m not smart enough for this! I’d yell.

It’s not that you’re not smart enough, he’d retort, you’re not interested!

Now, outside in the drifts, it occurred to me that I’d taken a similar approach to snow removal — disinterest, and thus a lack of learning. And that had left me listless and incompetent in a situation that I could not avoid for my whole life, unlike advanced placement calculus.

I decided that I had to learn. I tried watching the neighbors, but wasn’t that productive, (sorry, neighbors) because they are also by and large geriatric millennials who can’t cope with snow. Is everyone bad at shoveling because no one finds it interesting? This seemed possible. I texted my friend who lives in the Canadian sub-Arctic — maybe it was interesting there — but she was also unhelpful.

We are in an arid climate, she replied. We only get five inches at a time.

I despaired. I dug. I got depressed.

I think often about all the ways I want my children to be unlike me. I consider how I can help them to avoid inheriting my worst tendencies. I hope to encourage defiance of my natural inclination towards negative self-perception that may stand in the way of success or happiness. Which is to say I want them not to give up on math class because they think they’re not smart enough. Or because it’s not interesting. And maybe I also need to teach them how to take initiative to dig themselves out when they’re snowed under. Literally, figuratively.

Maybe I’ll learn alongside them. I still have work to do. After last week’s blizzard, I confess, I gave up halfway through. And then Eric took some DayQuil and dragged himself outside to finish the job. Because he is, after all, a man who shovels snow.

JHE

I’ve been thinking a lot about lists of men. I know I’m not alone. It’s hard not to think about these lists if you read the news. I read it less than I used to, right now, in an act of self-defense. I don’t know what’s going on. And yet, I do.

I know because I have my own personal list. I’d rather not. It’s long. I think most of us have some version of one, women, people who know what it is to live in a female body. My list has names, yes, quite a few. But the list has even more men who I can only identify by acts.

Man who shoved me to the sidewalk while I walked home from class on my second day of university. Man who looked at me — shocked, on the ground, scraped knees, dropped books — and called me a whore.

Man who laughed behind the desk at the police station when I reported the man who shoved me to the sidewalk.

Man who used a library book to only semi-conceal that he was masturbating, sitting next to me and my friend in the park.

Man who did not conceal at all that he was masturbating, striding next to me as I walked home alone down my block.

Man who told me that I should be flattered when I told him this had happened.

Man who groped me at work.

Man who groped me at work.

Man who groped me at work.

Man who tried to throw me in the back of his windowless van in front of my apartment building. Other man who tried to help him.

Man who, man who, man who, man who, man who.

There are men on my list who caused me severe harm. There are men on my list who didn’t, not severe. They are men who just made me into a woman who prefers to sit with my back to a wall in a restaurant. A woman who will never again speak to a stranger on an airplane. A woman who won’t employ a plumber to fix a broken pipe in her home unless a second person, a chaperone, is present.

My list accrues men less often these days. Rare drips, not floods. I was told this would happen, when I reached my 40s, that I’d vanish. Sometimes I think this was offered as a kind of comfort. Sometimes, I think it was offered as a form of admonition. The suggestion I should find something to appreciate.

There’s a diner in the next town over where we take the kids sometimes, in an attempt to teach them good manners, to conduct themselves in public. That’s a work in progress. I like the diner because I am sentimental for my own childhood, and it reminds me of the 90s. The decor is tan and brown, in the way that people decorated when they didn’t consider Instagram. The booths are large. The contents of the pastry case are brightly-lit (the contents of the pastry case may have been there since the 90s). There are televisions suspended from the ceiling showing local news. The food is bad, but not a disappointment, because the expectations are low.

I am conscious, in the diner, that my children may draw attention. They’re young, and it’s hard for them to sit still. They slide on the faux-leather seats. They finish coloring the pictures on the menus, and then they want to climb under the table, or build towers with the packets of jam and coffee creamer.

Don’t, I say, don’t, no, no. And then, the nuclear threat: Do you want your Jell-O, or —?

(They really want their Jell-O).

Throughout these meals, I make occasional eye contact with strangers. I pull faces that I hope are perceived as apologetic, lest we impact their enjoyment of their pancakes and matzo ball soup and cups of decaf coffee. I’m trying.

On one of these evenings, one of these strangers approaches us at the end of his meal. He’s been watching us. He is elderly. He has been dining with his daughter, who is middle-aged. He stands next to my daughter, who is a preschooler. The man looks down at my daughter. He leers.

I know your name, he says to her.

She looks up at him.

It’s Beautiful! he says.

M looks at him with an expression of disgust, like she thinks he’s a man who is a massive idiot, like this is a man who just said the stupidest thing she’s ever heard in her life.

No, she says. It isn’t.

JHE