elderly couple helped out by their busty, naked neighbor, 1962

“Sorry, Ethel, but I dropped it last week when I had my head out the window up there, trying to push snow down.”  Old Mr. Johnstone is explaining why his snow shovel is lying up on the roof, just short of the eave.  Only the outline of it is visible, under this morning’s flurry.

“I told him,” Mrs. Johnstone says, “‘Tom, you’re too old to be doing that.  Get one of the Marston boys.’”  The Marstons live on the other side.  That’s not an option now, during school hours.

Ethel, snow up past her ankles, her own shovel planted beside her, looks up, condensation forming as she breathes out.  The two old people are heavily bundled, though it’s only a few degrees below freezing.  Ethel’s bare skin is flushed from head to foot.  Her erect nipples seem to look upward with the rest of her.  She wiggles her unseen toes in the snow, trying to get some feeling back.

Mr. Johnstone insists on opening the garage himself and Ethel gets out the ladder.  As she ascends she ably grabs the rungs with her hard but nimble feet.  She gets up to the eave and reaches up, her breasts crushed against the icy gutter, and clutches the shovel, trying to shake the snow off it.  Looking up from below, one can see her soles stained black from the greasy grit from the floor in the garage.  It really was vile in there, though she was too polite to say so.

She turns and flings the shovel to the ground, to the side so that it doesn’t hit them.  When she gets down she picks it up for the old man.  He says he’ll get to shoveling the driveway but his wife stops him.  They’ll wait until Billy Marston gets back from school.

Ethel stands between them as they talk.  They’re facing the street, speculating on when the plow will come by now that it’s stopped snowing.  As they’re talking a column of snow silently slides off the roof, narrowly missing the Mr. and Mrs., but hitting Ethel square on the back of the head, the rest falling against her shoulders and her butt.

“WOOOHH!!” she cries, a sound very un-Ethel-like, her arms stretched out, her eyes widened, her voice breaking the silence of the snowy neighborhood and echoing against the houses.  She is out of breath, staggering around.  Her hair is blasted white, and her eyebrows.  As she turns toward the house a final clump of snow hits her just below the neck.  Now her breasts themselves are protruding eaves, twin porches supporting little white clumps.  Below, her pubic hair is as white as the hair on her head.  As she turns around again to face the old couple she is a naked snowwoman.

Secretly they’re all glad the little avalanche didn’t hit either of the seniors.  It could have knocked them down and caused serious injury.  “Are you all right, dear?” Mrs. Johnstone says.

“Wooo,” Ethel says again, a little quieter this time.  “I -- think you should have some snowcatchers put on. . . If you don’t mind I’m going to take a warm bath.”  They all laugh at this.

In fact all she does when she gets in the house is dry herself off, by which time she actually feels hot.  She has always enjoyed the tingling feeling of defrosting toes against the carpet as sensation returns.  She makes some instant coffee (Savarin is her favorite) and sits down to watch “The Guiding Light” as her shocked metabolism slows back down to normal.  Then she goes out again to finish shoveling her driveway.  This is usually not her task but the snow didn’t start to fall until everyone had left.  Sam has baseball practice today (indoor, using rubber balls) and she wants Mark to come home to a cleared driveway.  They have a big Oldsmobile Super 88 which barely fits as it is.  To make it fit in the carport Mark had to move the posts.