White Knight. Shining Armor.

At this point in this day I'm giving this blog post up to Nick Daniels, once the neighbor boy-wonder who cut all our lawns, now out on his own working with his dad in a thriving auto shop by day and still taking care of the rest of us by any other available hour. In the summer, Nick helps me reach the branches of the trees that have grown too tall for my own pruning. In the fall he takes away the leaves. In the spring he helps me mulch, if I need mulch, for a garden that (I admit) is ambitiously sized. Once I had a new front door put onto the house but it had a mind of its own. Nick stopped everything to help me get it closed. Took screws out, put them back in, joked around the entire time.

Yesterday, the snow, as you might have heard, came in high and heavy here in the east. This morning, having finished the first draft of a client project round about 9:30 a.m., I trekked outside to begin the business of clearing the path and the drive. An hour or so later, Nick drove by in his plow-outfitted pick-up.

"Hey, lady," he called. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I need to get the car out," I said. "Snow's in the way."

"Well, then," he said. "You step aside."

I was willing. Believe me, I was.

"Don't go anywhere, Nick," I told him, after a moment of watching him work.

"Why not?"

"I'm going in the house, to get my camera."

"What for?"

"So that people don't think I'm imagining things. So that they know you are real."

Those of you who read House of Dance and encountered a certain blue-eyed, car genius named Nick? Same guy, just grown up now.