The Universal Language of Food+Drink

I live in New England and this winter we've gotten dumped on several times by big snow storms. I drive an old German car that requires me to put heavy things in the trunk if I want to have any hope of going somewhere when it's slippery. So I don't get real excited about all of the wet white stuff, especially if I have anywhere to be. Sometimes it seems like driving my car is a two person sport and here I am, a team of one.

There's where today's story comes in! Last week we had a huge Noreaster that left about 18 inches of snow in its wake. Combine that with the snow that the plows repeatedly cast off onto my car's passenger side and the snow that a snowblower piled onto the driver's side from the sidewalk... let's just say it was harder than usual to get at my car:

So after that storm I cleared it off a bit, but found alternate ways to get where I needed to be. And then I left town, and left the snow to solidify for days. Today it started raining ice, so I decided it would be a great time to free my car from the grasps of its snow cocoon and move it to a place where I'd have a fighting chance of leaving from tomorrow morning when I actually will need to use it. After only a couple of minutes of attempting to rock it out after not shoveling enough around it, a man who was shoveling the sidewalks at the apartment building across the street came over and started to help me. This in itself is extremely rare based on my other getting-stuck experiences in this region. So obviously I wanted to talk to him about it and thank him, but it soon became clear that we faced an unfortunate language barrier.

After he helped me with the shoveling, he stuck around to help push me out of the spot (here's where the two person team comes in handy). I was extremely grateful, and wanted to convey that to him. I knew that he'd still be outside for at least a few minutes in the cold since he wasn't done with the walkway, so I ran up to my apartment and made him a cup of hot chocolate. When he looked up at me through the freezing rain and saw the steaming cup in my hands, a huge smile spread across his face. And that, my friends, is today's story of how food (or in this case drink) helped me show gratitude and put a smile on a stranger's face.