Picture yourself as a starving mountain climber with no food and no water, but at the peak of the treacherous mountain there is a surplus of fruit and water. This is an example of working hard to get a reward. Hard work always pays off in every case, even when it seems like what you’re doing is pointless. Except there was one big problem that was stopping me from even working hard to get something good out of it. That problem was that I didn’t want to leave my warm, soothing bed and go out into the frosty, snow covered world.

But my lulled brain knew what it had to. The last thing that I wanted to do was stare at my foggy windows, slowly being surrounded by a shroud of glassy ice. But that’s what I ended up doing until I forced my legs up and out of my bed I longed to stay in. Although all I wanted to do was return to my slumber, I knew that with snow like this, there would most likely be an opportunity.

Still in my soft pajamas, I suited up in so many layers that I couldn’t count them all. Then I headed into the outside world, blanketed by a sheet of blinding, white snow.  But there wasn’t any time to admire the scenery. I immediately went to work on the deck, my snow shovel in hand. With each scoop of snow, the load became heavier and heavier. I worked so hard until my hands were numbed through my counterproductive mittens. Scoop. Carry. Dump. Over and over again until the motion became automatic. I was like a machine made to shovel snow, and nothing else. But I wasn’t just shoveling my deck, I was working toward the goal I longed for; it couldn’t be completed without the hard work I was enduring.

It was the same pattern nonstop. Each frosty snowpile got heavier and heavier with each scoop the shovel took. This inevitably made my hands and arms numb to my aching bones. I was playing a chess match; with every snow pawn that I had captured, a new snow chess piece came to take its place.

It had taken hours of this hard work until I came to a halfway point, and there was no point in asking for help since my older (and stronger) brothers were still at peace in their warm, soft beds while I was out in the frigid snow fighting my own war, even though it seemed like I was losing even when I was winning. It appeared that every time I picked up an amount of snow in my shovel, double that amount of snow fell from the heinous sky. At this point I thought that the world had already picked a fate for me. And the criminal world had “graciously” given me the losing fate. Even though I had a snow pile big enough for what I needed, I wasn’t satisfied until I had shoveled all of the snow off of what used to be our shimmering, reddish-brown, spruce deck.  

Now I was sweating, beat-red even in the frozen wonderland I was fighting through. At some point the snowfall seem to slow, and I was making much more progress than the entire time I had already spent. And at the end of my hardships the deck was spotless, as it had been the night before. But more importantly, I had a snow pile taller than me.

Without haste I started my real objective. I flattened the top of the gleaming snow mound and shaped the base of the chilled pile so the journey to the top of the pile was not steep, but instead very gradual, as if I had stretched out a wad of sticky gum so it seemed much longer than it really was. Finally, I angled the slope towards the ice pond that had accumulated in my backyard over time. At long last the objective I’d been working towards all day was complete. I sprinted back up the stairs to the deck, trying not to trip in my clunky snow boots. I snatched my blue, circular shaped sled and positioned it on the mound. All the fluids in my body were boiling as I mounted the sled. I turned around so I was facing the solid, spruce deck wall. I stretched my stiff legs out so they were scrunched up against the rock solid deck and pushed as hard as I could. I zipped down the mound, racing faster and faster as I slid across the glazed ice.

It was all worth my hard work that I had endured. There was only one thing that I was worried about. I was running out of backyard. My puny sled was gaining more and more speed at a severe inclined rate. It seemed as if I was slicing through the air itself, getting closer and closer to the fence that separated my yard from the next. At this point I wasn’t even on the ice pond anymore, way farther than I expected to go, sliding and sliding on the sled until the inevitable happened. I slammed into the wooden fence with a crash! However, despite my crash, the only thought I had in my rattled head was to go again. So I did. I slid down the hill again and again until my worried mother called me in, for she was curious if I was still sane after the first crash.

If you’re the climber without food and water, working towards the peak to get what you desire, don’t give up, even if after you get to the grapes and they’re sour because you worked hard to get to the grapes in the first place. Hard work pays off, whether you’re a mountain climber fighting to survive, or just a boy trying to make a hill to sled down.

-Will Parsons