Loading The Back of the Shovel

Here it is, February already, the month that makes most people think about groundhogs, Superbowl’s, and Valentine's Day. I'm not most people, I guess, because I'm thinking about olden days, my father's advice, and shovels. Yup, shovels. Like I said, I'm not like most people.

You see, my father used to say something to me when I was young that didn’t make a damn bit of sense at the time. I was outside, tasked with digging a hole or moving dirt, I don’t recall which it was, I just remember I was doing it wrong. Scraping at the ground, half-filling the shovel, wasting energy. He observed quietly for a moment, then said this to me, like he was revealing some sort of secret.

“If you load the back of the shovel, the front will load itself.”

I stared at him like he’d just told me the shovel was going to magically grow arms and do the work for me. I nodded, because that’s what you do when adults say cryptic things, and went right back to not understanding it.

It took years for me to finally understand the intent behind the advice.

Now it’s month dedicated to hearts and chocolates and roses immemorial, and you are wondering why I’m thinking about dirt, and shovels, and father’s since passed. The simple answer is over the last few days, much of the country has been buried under snow. The kind of snow that doesn’t care how tired you are or how bad your back feels. The kind that still needs to be moved if you want to get out of the driveway or walk along a sidewalk without fear of slipping.

Shoveling snow is different than digging dirt. You don’t dig down, you dig out. You lean into it. You push. You lift carefully. Sometimes the front of the shovel is all you can load, because the load is too heavy to bear, but you put your back into it and do it anyway. Why? Because time and effort is wasted on half a load. The front of the shovel will fall in line if you load the back. It does the work for you, not with magical arms and an extra set of hands, but with gravity. Get the snow (or dirt) on the front half of the blade and you leave the rest of it empty and meaningless. But if you push in and get it all the way to the back, the shovel will be naturally filled, no void, no waste. You learn very quickly where to put your weight, because if you don’t, you pay for it later.

At my age, with my back and everything else going on, brute force isn’t an option anymore. Snow teaches you that fast. There’s a rhythm to it: push, lift, step, rest, breathe. You stop thinking about finishing the driveway and start thinking about the next scoop, because thinking too far ahead is how you end up flat on your back, staring at the sky, wondering why you didn’t listen to your own limits.And somewhere in the middle of all that cold air and quiet effort, that old sentence came back to me.

No February blog would be complete if it did not touch on the theme of love. Philos, Eros, Agape, whatever you choose to call it, I’ve learned over time that love works in much the same fashion as a shovel.

Not the shiny, romantic love that people like to sell in February, I’m talking about the real kind. The kind that lasts. The kind of love I have tried to thread through my books, because, after all, every story is a love story, isn’t it?

When we are young, we tend to think that love lives solely on the front of the shovel. The visible part. The words, the gestures, the chemistry. They are at the front because those are the things people notice first. Shiny. Attractive. But you soon find that when you try to scoop from the wrong angle, you wonder why nothing really sticks.

What actually holds tight is the weight that no one sees. The patience; the consistency; the humility. It lies in listening when you’d rather speak. Staying when it would be easier to walk away. Doing the unglamorous work long after the excitement wears off.

That kind of love doesn’t always feel the best. Sometimes the weight of it feels too heavy to handle. Sometimes it feels like restraint. And sometimes it feels like shoveling a path through the snow when you’d rather be inside where it’s warm.

But it holds; it’s the front of the shovel loading itself, and that matters more than how sparkly it looks.

I believe the same truth applies when it comes to writing.

Readers only see the front of the shovel—the finished pages, the sharp lines of dialogue, and the moment that land hard. They don’t see the back of the shovel. The weight of revisions that feel endless and the sentences rewritten ten times just to sound effortless. The nights when you know something is off but can’t yet name it.

If you rush the foundation, the story spills everywhere. It doesn’t hold. So, you slow down and put the effort where it matters––the back end of the shovel, even when it’s boring, even when no one is watching, even when no one is behind you, clapping and cheering you on.

Stories, like love, don’t care about your intentions. They care about where you put the weight.

It took me a long time (and more than a few mistakes) to understand what my dad was really teaching me that day long ago in a pile of dirt on a Kansas country home. He wasn’t talking about the dirt, or even about shovels. He was teaching me how to approach the weight of things. How to approach life.

Load the back of the shovel.
Trust the balance.
Respect the work.

And accept that the rest will come. Not with magical assistance, but it will come about honestly, in the right way.

One scoop at a time.