I thought about John Updike, who died two days ago, as I shoveled my walk yesterday morning. I thought, This is exactly what he would have written about—someone, in this case me, clearing the cold, wet snow from our walkways, stopping every few steps to bang the shovel on the ground to shake off the white clumps that stick to it, shoveling the snow from the path to the garbage cans only to uncover smeared grass and mud, and to realize that the path lay in a different direction.

Inside, the house smells like pancakes. John plays somewhere—I hope it's not with the dog, on whose head he likes to sit, and whose tail he holds as she tries to escape down the back stairs. He is so excited by her warmth and her fur that he needs to have her, to consume her in some way. Now my arm is tired, my elbow clicks, and I stop to rest and watch the snow fly from the front path, where Henry works quickly, more diligently than I do.

Updike’s character would have gotten the salt spreader from its spot under the overhang, as I did, carried it around the house, and started spreading, although I don’t know if he—it would have been a he—would have reached into the bottom of it, grabbed the clumps of melt that had stuck together there, and thrown them on the ground, stomping to break them up. His men were more precise workers, outdoors, than I am, and I wonder whether Updike would have attributed that to my interior, domestic, womanly heart? Would he have noted that I am careful in the kitchen, that in the kitchen I clean as I go, I wipe the counters down, I organize the dishwasher in a specific way, but out here I feel a freedom that is in fact the beginning of a kind of panic, a feeling that things are beyond my control, so I might as well not care?

Well. The rain comes down, then comes down harder. The snow melts beside the paths Henry and I cleared, and floods them with water. By late evening, everything is ice. David slips on the way inside, and goes out to spread more melt. It doesn’t matter. The morning is cold and everything, still, is ice.

I’m going to give blood today, so I reread Updike’s “Giving Blood.” It begins, “The Maples had been married now nine years, which is almost too long.” I’ve been married almost ten. The Maples are in their thirties, living in the suburbs, with children, and guess what? So am I. I bought the book this story is in, Too Far to Go, when I was nineteen, for a class, and I marked passages faintly in pencil. What’s funny to me now is not that I didn’t understand my future when I was nineteen, but that I felt it so intensely. The cruel things he says to her, the part where she tells him, “Now you’ve said things that I’ll always remember,” struck at my heart when I was younger, unmarried, without any children or even a concept of myself as a wife and mother. Now I read the story for the funny parts, the technique, and the ideas behind it. If my younger self hadn’t marked the way faintly in pencil, I probably wouldn’t remember that I came to it emotionally, first.

I’ve given blood twice before, and both times I felt I had to. Everyone was doing it. Yesterday I sat in the ice cream shop as the kids ate in silent dedication and read a sign on the window, backwards, the letters reversed. Blood emergency, I read, and then when I saw the date for giving donations, I thought, Yes. Is this further proof of my new, old cold-bloodedness? That I no longer fear the needle and a dizzy spell? What won’t I be afraid of next?