The snow came down on a Wednesday night, the kind that makes Dublin look innocent for about six hours before it turns to grey slush and trouble. I live on a small street between Phibsborough and Glasnevin, where most of the houses are old, most of the gates are stiff, and most of the neighbours know each other by sight rather than by name. By morning, the cars were soft white humps, the footpaths had disappeared, and the buses on the main road sounded like they were giving up before they even reached the stop.
I was working from home that day, sitting by the upstairs window with a mug of tea, feeling secretly pleased that I didn’t have to go near the Mater for my usual commute. Around half eight, I saw my neighbour, Mick, step out of number 17 with a shovel over his shoulder. Mick was in his late sixties, maybe older, though he carried himself like a man who refused to be counted properly. He wore a navy wool hat, an old GAA jacket, and wellies that looked as if they had seen every winter since the eighties.
I thought he was clearing his own path. Fair enough, I said to myself. Then he moved to number 19, where Mrs Kavanagh lived alone. She was ninety-one and always left her curtains half open, as if keeping one eye on the world. Mick cleared the snow from her steps, salted the patch by her gate, and tapped the letterbox twice before moving on. He didn’t wait for thanks. He didn’t even look up.
By the time I finished my first meeting, he was outside number 21, where Mr Osei, a retired bus driver, had bad knees and a laugh you could hear from three doors away in summer. Mick scraped and pushed and lifted, slow but steady. The snow was wet and heavy, the worst kind. He leaned on the shovel once, breathing hard, then straightened up and kept going. I watched him with that useless sympathy people have from behind glass.
It wasn’t until I saw him cross the road to Miss Doyle’s that I felt ashamed. She had fallen the previous year on black ice near the corner shop and had been frightened of winter ever since. I pulled on my boots and an old coat, found a brush in the shed because I didn’t own a shovel, and went out.
“You’ll do yourself an injury,” I said to Mick, which was a terrible opening line from a man who had just spent two hours doing nothing.
He looked at my brush and smiled. “And you’ll sweep Dublin clean with that, will you?”
We worked together then. He did the heavy pushing, and I brushed the edges and steps. The cold got into my fingers first, then my face, then somewhere behind my ribs. But house by house, the street began to reappear. At Mrs Kavanagh’s, she opened the door a crack and tried to hand Mick a tin of biscuits. He refused three times and accepted on the fourth because she looked close to tears. At Mr Osei’s, we heard him laughing from inside, shouting, “I knew the angels were Irish!”
After an hour, two more neighbours came out. Then a student from the flats at the end of the road. Then a woman named Aisling, who I had nodded to for four years without knowing her name, arrived with a bag of salt from her boot. Someone made tea. Someone else went down towards Phibsborough Road to see if the pharmacy was open. The snow had turned us, briefly, into the village we liked to pretend we already were.
It was only when we reached number 29 that I understood why Mick had started so early. That had been his sister’s house. Her name was Breda. I knew she had died the previous spring, but I hadn’t known much more than that. Mick stood at her
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
