Yesterday Port City, in its usual half-hearted way, dug itself out from yesterday’s snowstorm. As I strolled Aitch downtown, dodging moguls, I had occasion to recall his first few weeks with us, in frigid February ‘04, and remember how awful it is to wheel a stroller on snowy streets. Most people are pretty good about shoveling, but inevitably you run into a property line, where the adjacent occupants can’t agree on who owns the last foot, or the curb cut where the plows have piled snow from the street, so you can’t get out. There’s nothing worse than having to backtrack an entire block because your stroller is trapped. I think this is sufficient excuse for having let a few “oh, shits” escape my lips, even though I have been valiantly trying to contain that sort of ejaculation in the vicinity of Little Pitcher.

Of course, Aitch picked up on it right away, but he waited until later to spring it. “Oh, shit,” he said as I was putting him into his snowsuit later that day. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.” He looked at me expectantly. He wasn’t giggling with glee, which meant that he didn’t realize it was something “bad,” but he was anticipating some praise for picking up on my expression.

I tried to be cool. “‘Outside’?” I asked, nonchalantly. “Yes, Aitch, we’re going outside.”

“Outside?” he tried on. “No, Mommy. ‘Oh, shit.’”

Oh. Shit.

Anyway, I was boiling with anger at having to walk the stroller on the street because our neighbors, a soon-to-be-defunct chapter of the Knights of Columbus (motto: “Keep Christ in Christmas and strollers in traffic, where the Baby Jesus would have traveled!”), left a portion of their sidewalk impassable and the curb cut to the street obstructed. Then I had a brain wave. “I could come out here with a shovel,” I thought, “and clear the path downtown I use every day. I should do it now, before the snow gets too packed.” So I took Aitch home, grabbed the shovel, wheeled him back along my usual route, and shoveled myself out of every place between here and the business district that the stroller could not fit.

At one point, a young man who was gassing up his car at the station across the street saw me, ran across the street, grabbed the shovel and widened the path down the sidewalk for me. How lovely — someone being nice for no reason at all.

I was a bit disgruntled with myself, because an act like shoveling a neighbor’s walk should proceed from an impulse of generosity like his, and not from irritation, like mine. But maybe the dozens of stroller-piloting parents who pass this way each day will benefit from my random act of selfishness.