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A Living Inheritance
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0FRHPRVB6
Cape Breton Stories, Myths and the Occasional Half-Truths
Stories rooted in Cape Breton folklore and memory—for readers who miss the island, feel drawn to its myths, or carry it quietly with them.
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Shovelling Man Questionnaire
As I begin my rewrite for publishing, I ask that you take a few minutes to fill out my brief 12-question questionnaire. There are no wrong answers, only your perspective, and that is what matters most. The final question invites you to share a memory, moment, or observation from your own life. Thank you!
Women’s Craft as Protection and Guardianship:
Both The Lace Weaver of Sydney & The Quilt Keeper of Glace Bay frame women’s domestic crafts as protective practices that hold families and communities together at moments of vulnerability and change.
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I am revisiting my Shovelling Man Series in April 2026 and will publish it on Amazon by Nov 1.
Publishing on Amazon November 2026!
Discover the shovellingmanseries
Frank, a widower navigating the space between grief and rebirth, shovels snow because it’s all he knows to do. In frozen mornings of loss, tentative connections, and an unknown future, he takes one step at a time. It’s a raw, hopeful journey—where quiet acts reveal what it means to move forward on uncertain paths.
Welcome to Frank's Story...
The Shovelling Man Series
reviews:The Shovelling Man Series
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“The book is an insightful account of the grief journey of a spouse and the difficult decisions he makes to honour his beloved while he struggles to move forward.” (...and
YOU have inspired us to BURN our many years worth of journals some time late summer.
Then no dilemma for those we leave behind.
THANK you for your "Shoveling Man" idea.) Joyce B
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The Shovelling Man Series is a very compassionate book. It's a simple story about a man who is suffering after the death of his wife. He has to heal his grief. And there is all this snow outside...It's very Zen. It's a story about how much he loved his wife. It's also a story about how he must go on. It's a very stoic story. I really enjoyed this book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcp2SkijEGc
Excerpts from The Shovelling Man Series (1-7)
#1 The Shovelling Man: A Fox
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.
#2 The Shovelling Man Begins
If Gord could drag a huge Christmas Tree home, he could shovel some snow. He looked out the back door and decided he would shovel. It was not a monumental task.
If Julie were here, still with him, they'd shovel until their faces were numb. Afterwards, she’d make the hot-buttered rums, and he'd bring wood up from the basement and spark the fire.
She'd sit in hers and he in his. Contented.
Fifty years of contentment.
#2 The Shovelling Man cont.
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.
#3 Shovelling Man: For You, Julie, I can do anything!
A plough rambled down the road, leaving a fat lip of snow at the base of his driveway. By the time he had cleared it, his ears were freezing and his fingers stiff. When the shovel broke, he tossed it behind the garage.
Only an excuse was all he ever needed for a trip to the Canadian Tire; Julie’d tease him. She’d be leaning against the stove, waiting for whatever she was baking. She was always baking something. The warmth, the smells of ginger cake, apple pies and bread she had taken with her.
#3 Shovelling Man cont.
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.
#4 Shovelling Man: The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Over the next few months, they embarked on a shared journey through the book, their together-readings and earnest discussions serving as a lifeline between them. The readings guided Frank through the preparation and provided them with a shared language, an intimate, comforting and necessary dialogue.
At night, he'd whisper in her ear: Fundamental light. Oh, nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted...
There were other nights when they would put on Van Morrison's Into the Mystic. He'd twirl her around in the living room until she couldn’t. He dropped his head into his hands and stayed there until the grief passed. Then, he dressed and grabbed his shovel.
Gord looked out his living room window. It was midnight, and Frank was shovelling. He shook his head, but he understood.
∞
#5 Shovelling Man: Humbled by Her Courage
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.
#5 Shovelling Man: cont.
What would he do without her?
I won't be here for you, she said.
Ahh, he said, but you'll be up there holding the door.
She nodded a smile. Let me do the cleanup.
Frank knew she cried when she washed dishes. And that she needed to have her time alone. Signals of their new status.
Lord Tennyson came to mind as he sat in his reading chair:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair,
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
He reached for Tennyson in their collection to read the poem because he decided to combine contemporary and ancient materials for her service.
#6 Shovelling Man: A Shovel in His Eye
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.
#6 Shovelling Man: cont.
What was next? What could possibly be next?
He knew he needed to consider Julie's sewing room, as she called it. Her stuff, notebooks, drawings, journals and extensive wardrobe neatly divided into seasons and colours. Her things were beyond his understanding. Yet, he knew he needed to do this because she was not coming back.
Now?
Yes, now.
He set his shovel behind the garage in a snowbank. Icicles hung from the garage.
#7 Shovelling Man: Once the Snow Had Gone
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.
#7 Shovelling Man: cont.
Everything was different now.
He sighed and looked up the road at his neighbours’ homes.
Everything was different now.
From here on, things would change. He knew it. He could feel the change within. He was at the corner of what was and what would be.
Tibetan Book of the Dead: the 49th day
Kimberley Anne Williamson
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. Sources such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Stephen Jenkinson's Die Wise predominated her outside reading.
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 Kim in KL working on her Master of Communication and what she did to keep from being overwhelmed by the work and being older than the students and Profs..
#8 Shovelling Man: The 49th Day!
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!
#8 Shovelling Man: The 49th Day!
God, he wished he could pick up his shovel and head outside. It would be so much better than the finality of burning her life story. The firepit was set up in his backyard, ready to be lit. All he had to do was carry her journals to the backyard.
The sun hit his forehead, telling him it would be down soon. Final decisions to read or release.
He picked up the Tibetan Book and reread the passage that warned her not to return, for he knew she could never. They had talked about this point.
Be not attracted to the dull blue light of the brute-world; be not weak. If thou art attracted, thou wilt fall into the brute-world, wherein stupidity predominates, and it will be a very long time ere thou canst get out.
That was when they laughed, and she would apologize for needing to leave this brute-world first.
Be not attracted to it. Put thy faith in the bright, dazzling, fire-coloured radiance. Direct your mind one-pointedly toward the deities, the Knowledge-Holding Conquerors and the Ḍākinī...
And Julie would say: Ah, the Ḍākinī, the beautiful “sky dancers,” and the most sacred female in The Tibetan Book. And she would smile and say, I am awaiting the moment I meet the Ḍākinī who will have come from the holy paradise realms to receive Me...
And Julie would repeat: Me! With her hand held over her heart.
And Frank would say, I haven't got my travelling suit pressed and ready to go yet.
And Julie would assure him that she would keep the light on for him.
He held the book to his heart, closed his eyes, and waited for the spirits to disappear.
When he had lit the fire, he watched it consume a lifetime of her words.
#9 Shovelling Man: Time was Up!
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.
#9 Shovelling Man: cont.
Frank said he had nothing to do with it and added a weak laugh.
As the days passed, he became acutely aware that the nights were getting longer, and he inexplicably felt ill at ease about something he couldn't define or dismiss.
Leaves drifted down from the birch, creating a mottled canvas of his lawn and walkway. He raked, bagged, mowed, trimmed, and weeded, and afterwards, he sat in exhausted silence on Julie’s swing in the backyard.
He spoke so rarely that his voice was rough, and the heaviness of unexpressed thoughts inside him was collecting like old arthritis.
It was as though someone had pulled a curtain around his life.
Before, he and Julie had filled their days with an ongoing conversation. All the stories about their neighbours, funerals, weddings, and guess who I bumped into today were done. The trusted daily company that asked how he was and where he was off to was done, too. And there was no, good night, Frank, before the click of the bedside lamp.
Frank had never truly contemplated leaving before, but now he wondered, given the statelessness of his life. When thoughts became things, and he remembered the sunrise morning.
He stowed the lawn mower in the garage next to his shovel collection and closed the garage.
He was going to go inside, but something like an unfinished thought stopped him.
Since he burned Julie’s journals, he felt he'd aged twenty years. He seemed to be living without either a past or a future. He was floating─ a floating yardman without a wife.
No one knew what she knew about him, her, them. She’d taken their stories with her. She’d erased the chalkboard, deleted the content, cut the connections, severed like a head decapitated.
Such a gruesome thought. Where did that come from?
#9 Shovelling Man: cont.
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.
#9 Shovelling Man: cont.
Imagine, Frank, we will pay homage to Jesus's apostle, James the Greater, whose decapitated remains have rested in the Santiago Cathedral since the 9th century.
Oh, he remembered the decapitation. Thanks for the thought, Julie.
Imagine, Frank.
And he Imagined.
Cued by the taxi's honk, Frank locked the house and grabbed his luggage. Time was up. He was going!
As the taxi pulled out of his driveway, he was sure he saw the bedroom curtain move.
Impossible! Frank looked away.
He double-checked that he had his passport, currency, and airline ticket.
His hands sweated as he walked through the airport.
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Questions or Comments?
You can reach out to me with a message or ask a general question related to grief and healing, life after loss, or the Shovelling Man Series as well as Cape Breton Stories, Myths and the Occasional Half-Truths by emailing: shovellingmanseries@gmail.com.
The Shovelling Man Series by Kimberley Williamson
