Waxing Nostalgic

Saturday was the 14th anniversary of my Dad’s passing. I didn’t write about it because the day was what every day has been since January 10, 1995 ~ without him. Since then I’ve been waxing a bit nostalgic, made easier by some darlings of the written blurt on Facebook.

It started easily enough by someone posting a picture of her home in upstate New York with the four foot high snow drifts plowed to perfection in front.

It recalled to mind my energetic youth. We lived on a higher elevation and the weather on the hill was always more dramatic than it was in town. As a matter of fact, the school used to call my Dad to ask if he thought the bus would make it up the hill. Dad would then ask us if we felt like going to school that day ~ to which we replied NO ~ and he would tell the Superintendent that the bus would never make it. Schools would close.

This wasn’t completely irresponsible on Dad’s part. He and neighboring farmers spent their share of hours towing a number of stricken buses out of a field or a ditch in the dead of winter. It was seriously a different world weather-wise.

Oh, but the fun we would have in the snow! We would dig tunnels at the end of which little huts would be carved that would include with windows peeking into each other’s minute abodes. I imagined sleeping in them, with a candle in each “window”. By the I got to that stage of the fantasy, the “huts” would cave in because one of the hated brat siblings would walk over the roof, unaware that the snow below was hollow.

If the weather was fine enough, we’d shout the quarter mile to our cousins up the road (we had developed a distinctive “call”), grab our sleds and meet in the field between the houses. It was a terrific hill, with ~ oh, the peril ~ barbed wire and a road at the bottom. The most skilled sledders forged a path that avoided both, but sometimes the smaller kids would fly through and we’d have to run down and carry them, snotty faces and all, back to the house.

Little kids were perpetually stupid.

The shale pit was the most fun, its sheer vertical drop in the middle and natural sled jumps that would injure my sister’s tail bone every single year. I think she was eleven when she stopped going and I think her tail bone still hurts.

Snowmobiling was a treat when Mary’s family ~ a farm over ~ invited us up. Of course when the pond froze solid (Dad would get out into the middle of it and jump up and down) we’d ice skate.

Hours and hours and hours spent in the frozen cold. But that wasn’t even the best part. The best part was going inside with frozen noses, ice having formed on the cotton knit gloves that smelled like cold and snow and caked with junk from your face. We’d go inside, put on dry clothes and curl up with Dad who was laying on the floor watching football. He had the best spot – by the heat duct – so that warm air would blow up into the blanket warming numb purpled toes. We’d fall asleep and wake up to tomato soup or Spaghetti-Os and hot chocolate.

The we’d be ready to go outside again at the best time of the day – winter twilight.