The secret of happiness is a snow shovel in hand

Winter is what we were meant for, and we welcome it. We thrive on adversity and that's just the truth. The snow shovel is the secret of happiness. We older guys who have moved into heart-attack country pick up the shovel, aware of the risks, and feel a gathering of the vital inner oomph for the challenge ahead, the sheer heroism of the thing, and we attack the snowdrifts like the hero of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Snow - what is life without adventure? Adventure brings out the best in you. Amiability. Kindness. And if you're lucky, sweet amour.

Meanwhile, those unraked leaves of slackers will freeze and form a hard crust and kill the grass. In the spring, they'll seed and lay sod, but grass will never grow there again, because of powerful toxins created by unraked leaves, and as a result those homes will lose half their value and the nonrakers will go bankrupt. They will lie awake at night, thinking, "Why? Why did I not rake those leaves when my neighbors raked theirs?"

It was the romanticism of autumn, the need to be unique and to march to your own drummer. Too late now. Those families will be forced to migrate south and pick cotton and live in shotgun shacks and eat biscuits and gravy with hubcaps for plates and be tormented by red-eyed evangelists and banjo-picking albinos and clouds of horseflies and cottonmouth snakes slithering into the bedroom at night.

We don't have poisonous snakes up north, not during winter, nor horseflies to trouble us, and so we focus on what is important. Preserving the Union. Husbandry. Gladness of heart. Snow shoveling. The sheer satisfaction of it. We're fine up north. It's you Southerners we're worried about.

Garrison Keillor's column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is oldscout@

prairiehome.us.