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A storm of life, a metaphor without a wife. 

Twenty-one days had passed since he had belonged to anyone. Sleep was his respite. He looked over at the sofa where he slept, a stark reminder of his solitude, and then back to the window, where he had kept a vigil since he had quit the TV. He scanned the horizon of houses, streetlights, and roads, watching for anything that moved. One night, a fox cantered down his road and into the woods. Most nights, he waited for the teenage boy to cross in front of his window at 11:55. Shoulders hunched and smoking a cigarette, a solitary figure in the night. He wondered if the boy had ever seen the fox. 

He shook his head at his silent chaos and the unsettling feeling of death still alive in his mind. 

When he stepped outside, he raised his shovel like a sword and breathed in the icy air. 

Julie was probably watching him from above. 

Keep the light on for me, he said to the pale grey sky, and he dug the shovel in.

As he backed the truck out of the garage, he looked at the blue shutters with the cutout hearts─Julie’s choice. Everything was her choice.

Frank followed the plough tracks down the road. When he reached for his sunglasses, he ignored her gloves on the passenger's seat, her sunglasses in the cup holder, and the statue of St Christopher she hung from the rearview mirror to keep them safe. 

How could she have passed and left so much behind? Every inch of their home was hers. 

On the nights when Frank couldn't sleep, he would shovel and then head to the backyard, where he would sit in the snowbank behind the garage and beneath the big spruce so the neighbours couldn't see him. 

Frank watched the streetlights fill with snow. That night, he remembered Julie pointing at him and saying, You can do this! 

Frank wanted to be nearby while she worked in the kitchen, in case. He looked out their back window as she prepared their supper. The trees cast deep black shadows, like they did tonight. 

Since Julie had returned from her three-month hospitalization, Frank had cooked every night except for that one; she had insisted. 

He awoke, startled by the bizarre dream of a shovel in his eye. 

Shovel in my eye?! Shovel in my eye?! 

See what?! 

Am I supposed to see something? 

The ambiguity of the dream bothered him like a message only half heard. He had zero patience for anything that wasn’t as straightforward as death. 

Frank watched the sunrise. He had not slept because his mind was lit with the possibilities of his life. 

His ideas were beyond his ken. It was as though he had stepped inside a gateway, a portal to places of his imagination where adventures were there for the taking. 

He and Julie had done everything together.
They were a good couple. But now Frank was alone, and time was ticking away on his clock.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead's descriptions of the Bardo’s states between death and rebirth reflected how he felt himself to be. He was between the between. Between life and death-the death of his wife of fifty years and his own rebirth into… That was the question he feared to pose. He did not know what was after the old life and what began his new life. 

He knocked on Julie's sewing room door like she could be there. Usually, he would pass her the book to reread as she had done before she left, travelled, passed, died. 

They would read it together later in the night. There was a place for it on the bookshelf next to her reading chair. 

He looked around at all the things, hers, not his. 

He wanted to back out, and for a furious moment, he wished she had taken care of her things instead of leaving everything to him.

He sat under the window on a pillow with her notebooks in front of him. He opened the final page of her last journal. Remember, The Book says that on the 49th day, I will be reborn. Today was that day! 

He wished her a clear and untroubled mind, and then he read. 

You have always wanted to do some things; now go do them. I'll meet you again later. Be brave.

Later. He stumbled on the word.  And what was it he wanted to do?

Frank was no longer bursting with ideas. Wild travel, new hobbies, and whatever else he had thought about during the sunrise were all pipe dreams. 

He would never get rid of one of her notebooks.  No,he would. He had to!

Frank would find a new barber on the other side of town. He’d been going to Charlie for years but couldn’t do the conversation with him and the guys who would regularly show up for morning coffee. 

They knew too much about him, which made his grief and confusion easy to read. After he left, there would be a Poooor Frankie! comment with their coffee. He knew because he’d participated in these conversations before. And though it wasn’t meant to be derisive, it would place him in a category of slumped-shouldered widowers. 

Besides, conversation required too much of him these days. Really, all he wanted was to dig shovelfuls of the white stuff and throw it until he was too tired to think, but that had come to an end. 

Spring had arrived. Frank went to Canadian Tire and bought a rake─ an ergonomic tool for the serious yardman. He stood in the backyard with his arms crossed on the top of the rake and looked away at nothing, wondering what he was doing. Was he the yards man of the property that was no longer a home?

He didn’t know.

When the crocuses appeared in the neighbourhood, but Julie's did not, Frank raked their property again. When the daffodils and tulips failed to grace the front garden, Frank was perplexed. But neighbours stopped and commented when the row of poppies never appeared. 

Back inside, he moved from room to room, pushing aside the curtains to look outside, and that was it. Life was outside him, and he knew it. But to take the first step. 

He sat in his chair in the living room window. His hands folded into prayer. How do I walk away? 

He found it among her cookbooks. 

She had drawn the yellow scallop shell on the cover of a day planner. This was her preparation for their walk on the Camino Santiago in Portugal. The Camino Portuguese was the main topic of conversation before she got ill. 

He had forgotten. 

He opened her book and saw the woollen socks, hiking boots and walking sticks she had ordered for them and he laughed. Julie loved to plan. She had notes about the hotels, medieval towns, cobbled laneways with tapas bars and cafés, and a prison tower turned library. There was the bridge from the 1300s they would cross. And there were the long conversations after dinner about the metaphysics of the walk. 

Imagine, Frank, she would begin, you and I walking the 12th-century pilgrim route from the Crusades that pilgrims had chosen because it offered them a safer alternative to the Holy Land. 

Imagine, Frank, Templar-built castles and churches, golden-adorned sanctuaries funded by pilgrim offerings.

Kim Williamson writes with the quiet authority of someone who has looked directly at mortality—and kept writing. Her work is shaped by age-earned wisdom and a deep curiosity about the human condition: how we endure, how we remember, and how, in the face of loss, we begin again. Her stories are not escapes from reality but invitations to stand in it more fully. 

Frank, The Shovelling Man, emerged from Williamson’s return to a long-absent winter. After nearly a decade away from snow, she found herself watching the simple, repetitive act of shovelling, and saw in it something deeper: a metaphor for effort, grief, and the stubborn beauty of starting over. Frank’s story begins in the raw aftermath of losing Julie, his wife of over fifty years. Alone in his Nova Scotia home, he doesn’t chase healing; he shovels forward.

His journey is not about conquering grief; it's about what it means to carry the weight of absence and still move forward. As Frank moves from the snowbanks of Nova Scotia to the ancient roads of Portugal and the cafés of Seville, we see not a man escaping life, but a man choosing to stay in it, fully present, aware, and quietly courageous.

PS: This is me in KL working on my Master of Communication and what I did to keep from being overwhelmed.