Be Not Idle

It’s relatively warm still. I was in St. Clair just a couple hours ago and the temperature fell to -2 degrees Fahrenheit already. Yet it’s not THAT cold.

How cold?

As cold as my hometown in the ’70s, a decade that seemed rife with icestorms and blizzards that knocked the power out. At one point, we lost power so long that Mom cooked over the woodstove and Dad cut a hole in the ice to bring in lakewater for flushing the toilet.

Here are some impressions of the cold back then:  

We took showers at night. The kids who showered in the morning had frozen hair when they got on the bus.  There’s nothing like seeing a teenaged boy brush a fringe of hair away from his eyes – and the entire swath of hair moves like a toupee.

Our nostrils would stick shut when we inhaled because the moisture would freeze our nosehairs together.

We wore scarfs over our faces, but the inside of the scarves STILL stiffened with frost. You didn’t dare lower the scarf to wipe a snotty nose. That would make all the moisture freeze in an instant – the ultimate in chapped skin.

At least once during the winter, one of us would smile and bust a lip. Owie…

My elder brother scared me because he said the booming I heard outside at night was a monster. It was really the sound of ice forming and expanding on the nearby lake.

Several trees near our house exploded from within because sap or perhaps rainwater trapped in hollow spots froze and cracked the surrounding wood.  

The biggest trees in our neighborhood were the poplars, those giants with knobby twigs like arthritic knuckles. An icestorm took most of them down in one fell swoop, but our house wasn’t hit.

When it got cold enough, the snow sounded like stryrofoam underfoot and made the perfect sliding surface for racing. But it wasn’t nearly as slick as the amazing runs that Dad built out of snow. The first ones ran  from the wall near the driveway to the lake. Dad made them faster by pouring hot water on them – a do-it-yourself Zamboni. Later the neighbor’s hill became the launching pad that carried us over the ice rink and into the opposite snowbank. 

They weren’t sled runs – they were were for SAUCERS, those round dangerous things. The saucers were heavy plastic, but the straps were cheaper plastic that inevitably broke. Dad replaced them with leather straps held on with bolts.  They were perfect for aspiring juggernauts.

Ah, winter! Good times!