Saturday, January 28, 2017

WINTER THOUGHTS

                                                
If you can believe the weather forecasters, sometime today it will start to rain and then change to snow and that winter we all hoped would come later then sooner, will be here. I took a “once more” look around the yard this morning to see if there was anything I missed in my winter preparations. Put away the rakes and dumped the potted plants.  I moved the snow blower from storage to active duty, checked the oil and gassed it up. Put the plow on the 4-wheeler. Let the games began.

There is a certain amount of sadness that comes with the end of fall but then sadness might be to strong a word, but the brevity of the proper wording eludes me at this time. I guess it’s somewhere between sadness and acceptance. We had one of those autumn seasons that seemed to be a gift from the Weather Gods but there comes a time when the earth has tilted to far on its axis that even they can’t squeeze out another Indian summer day so they too capitulate and admit its time.

For Molly and I, it’s one last walk in the woods today. I used to walk all winter no matter the weather but old age brings with it a certain amount of uncertainty and slipping and falling far off the beaten path is not something I need. Some time after Christmas Pat and I will leave for a warmer gentler climate. Something that when I was young and brash I swore I would never do. That was before I saw the winter season through the eyes of the skeptic I have now become to be and not the eyes of that energetic young man who loved to ice fish, snowmobile and scoff at the elements. “Bring it on” was my mantra back then.

I close my eyes, sitting here at my desk and my mind wanders back to the early 1950’s in Staples where I grew up. Our house was heated with wood. We had one of those old forced air furnaces in the basement that looked like the arms of an octopus if you ventured down there to see it. It worked on the concept that warm air rises and it expelled its heat through a large register in the floor. Sad to say it only worked as long as you fed it, which was about every two hours. That meant at night the fire went out. Four of us boys wintered in an upstairs bedroom at night. I say wintered because the temperature in that unheated room frequently went below freezing at night. I submit as evidence of this the frozen enamel pot we took up with us for nature calls at night. We were told to empty it and clean it each morning and some mornings that only consisted of tossing a frozen urine ice cube into the commode.


My father walked everywhere he went in the winter because the car won’t start anyway. He wore long johns and two pair of pants to his work on the railroad. Six buckle overshoes with felt boots inside of them. Stocking caps and chopper mitts. But he never complained about the cold and he wouldn’t listen to us if we did. Mom told me that in one twenty-year stretch he never missed a day of work. He couldn’t, he needed the money that badly. Minnesotans are survivors and for many years I was proud to be one too. But I got spoiled as the years went by. So I’ll see you all in the spring but I’ll still be writing from Arizona.

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