Baby, It's Cold Outside

 

      Winter has taken it's own sweet time coming, this season, but it finally got here. First the wind came, groaning in the tree tops and growling through the hollers. Some of it still lingers but, for the most part, high winds have been replaced by plummeting temperatures. Today is cold, but sunny, and the little bit of snow we did get, sparkles in the deceptively warm looking light. The sky is a bright, clear, blue with a few scattered, high-up clouds. Current outdoor temp, at 9:24 a.m. is 17 and is projected to go all the way up to 19 this afternoon. Cold? Well, that's a relative term. It's cold compared to what we've been having, but a far cry from years past when we would spend a week or so in single, or even minus, digits. Let's just say I'm not looking forward to going out in it, even for a little bit.  

     Snowfall, so far, has been the bare minimum, with the biggest one measuring in at a whopping two inches. Again, I can't say I'm sorry we didn't have more, but I've been remembering snows of my childhood and missing the fun and adventure they brought with them.  I'm not sure if those long ago snows were so big because I looked at them from a small child's body, or if it's due to my aging memory.

     I remember snowsuits, and rubber boots that were hard to put on, and even harder to take off, over our shoes. I remember plastic bread bags worn over our shoes when we didn't have boots, and snowmen with faces made of little chunks of coal from the bin. I remember the igloo my dad made for us one year, piling up what seemed like a great mound of snow, packing it tight, then hollowing out a space big enough for two little girls to crawl in long enough to pretend they were Eskimos for awhile. That was when we still lived in Shippingport in the little, three room, tarpaper house.

    A few years later we had moved to Medicine Woods (named for a place in a Harold Bell Wright novel) and there was a worn, rutted track that ran back over our hill.  When we had a good snow, my sister and brothers and I would drag a toboggan almost to the top of the hill and position it carefully to "ride the ruts" to the bottom. That took a little cooperation and teamwork because, on the bends, we all had to lean just enough in the right direction to keep the toboggan riding the rut instead of careening off into the brush. Most of the time we made it!