THOUGHTS OF WINTER

Maybe it was the day the acorns started bouncing of the roof-- and my head-- and the birch tree turned yellow that I got the first hint that summer was saying good-bye. Later driving down the road I noticed the sumacs were turning red and there were few boats on the lakes anymore, and some of the cabins were already shuttered. The schoolyards are busy again and those orange buses are back on the road and the roads also see more motor homes heading south in the exodus, I call the flight of the silver heads.

I remembered back some sixty years when I was a kid and winter preparations seemed so much more complicated then they are now. There was wood to cut and stack and still warm caning jars, filled with vegetables and fruit covering the kitchen table. Mom would make me take them to the cellar, two at a time and stack them carefully on the shelves. Potatoes were dug and put in gunny bags and carrots and beets were hung from the cellar rafters.  Storm windows were dug out of the back of the porch, washed and put back up and straw bales were stacked next to the leaky foundation of the old house. Now days we close the windows, lock them and push the little button on top of the thermostat from cold to heat and sit back and wait.

I remember when the thing I was most proud of was a sheepskin parka my dad had bought me at an auction. Mom knitted our mittens and caps and my overshoes had six buckles on them that would get full of ice and you had to wait for them to thaw out before you could leave that chair on the rug by the back door. The back of your mitten was your handkerchief for that rosy running nose you always had. We had a sled with steel runners that we drug up to Allen’s hill by the Catholic school in Staples for a two-block icy ride down to the bottom. It wasn’t any Arctic Cat by any stretch of the imagination but we had fun and it always started. There was a skating rink at the bottom of the hill with an old boxcar for a warming house and when you got too cold you could go in there to warm up and carve your name and your sweeties in the wooden walls.

My three brothers and I slept upstairs in an unheated bedroom, in a bed piled high with comforters mom had made. The windows would freeze over with frost and you would lie in bed and try to think what the ice crystal patterns looked like. Waterford was no match for Mother Nature. When mom called you downstairs for school you ran for the kitchen with your clothes under your arm to dress around the cook stove. While you ate your oatmeal she would walk around the table with a pan of warm soapy water, making sure your face was clean and your hair was combed.

Maybe it was the simplicity of it all that makes me think fondly of it yet today rather than the cushy life I now have. Oh, I do appreciate the cushy life I now have, but appreciation only comes because I know what it used to be like---and hear we go again kids--- yes, back in the good old days. We were just happy to be alive and healthy back then and yes, there are probably some who live like that even today. In some ways I would kind of envy you, if time hadn’t spoiled me so much.