In the early morning hours between sleep and consciousness, I heard a loud and constant “ Scrape, scrape, scrape ! Thud, thud, thud .” Too tired to care what it might be, I went back to sleep. The sound then made an appearance in a shallow dream I had, where my dog was digging a hole in the ground. I woke again, and still made no attempt to figure out where the noise was coming from, it was somewhere outside my window and that’s all that bothered to register. I took my dog out for her morning walk, still sleepy eyed and in auto-mode, to find the noise was a young man scraping the inch and a half layer of ice off the stairs and sidewalks of our apartment building. He was using a metal garden hoe, that was the only thing strong enough to break through the solid sheet. It was then that I realized, he had been at this for hours! I also noticed a man, who I was fairly certain was a neighbor from another building, finishing up a conversation with the ice scraping boy. I wondered, could he b