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Herewith a couple of quotations about winter to ease the pain of its arrival. First, Ogden Nash: “Winter comes but once a year/And when it does it brings the doctor good cheer.”
Then a Nash predecessor, G. Chaucer: “The turtles vois is herd by douve sweete/The winter is goon, with all his reynes wete.” (Mark Twain said Chaucer was a good poet, but his spelling was poor.)
One poet denounces winter’s arrival, the other salutes its departure. Neither of them likes it very much. Who does? Still there it is and it leaves its mark in the memory. Mine goes back to the time of the Little Ice Age. It lasted through my youth. The first thing I remember about it is the windowboxes. Everyone had them, not because there were no refrigerators, buy that there was plenty of frosty weather and you could save on electricity by securing a tin box with a sliding door to your windowsill to keep milk and butter in. Today it wouldn’t pay. Today we have sissy winters, not like the he-man types of those days.
Another childhood memory is of the men lined up on Archer St., our shopping street, with long-handled shovels in their hands ready to go to work on clearing the snowdrifts left behind by the latest storm. It seemed an odd sight somehow, not being an everyday thing, but it might have made a deeper impression if I’d realized that these men were there because we were in the Depression and they needed a job of any kind, even shoveling snow for a nickel an hour or whatever they got.
It took more than the Depression to discourage a kid with two feet of snow on the ground and a Flexible Flyer to conquer the slopes with. Those were the days of Henry Morgan’s famous weather prediction “Snow tonight, followed by little boys with sleds.” I don’t remember ever sleighing in a park as they do now. We used the streets and felt no need for a park, when the good hills were the public roads and traffic was so light that we only had to suspend operations occasionally to let it go by.
By now you must be thinking that I’m all wrapped up in the good old days when I used to go gadding about with Grandma Moses in her one-horse open sleigh, but it’s not actually so. I kinda miss the old winters, it’s true, but like everyone else I miss myself more. Nothing to be done about that, though, so I’ll stop singing Bring Back Yesterday and stick to just trying to visualize it for the benefit of those who haven’t had the bracing experience of digging out a four-door sedan from a five-foot snowdrift on a one-way street.
It was memorable, especially the way the wheels used to chew up the old rugs you tried to shove under them to give them some traction. The place where I prayed not to be buried was the entrance to my own driveway in Scarsdale. If I didn’t make it in I would be left with the back of the car extending out into the roadway obstructing it completely. But it could happen.
The house was on a steep hill, Lee Road, which iced up considerably in a storm. We were on the lower end. meaning that you were sliding pretty fast by the time that you got to it from the top. Coming up from the bottom was impossible. You had to take your chance coming downhill braking hard and trying to turn in instead of sliding by. If you didn’t make it, you just had to start all over again. To get back up to the top of the hill for another try, you had to go south a block to a parallel street since your own ended at the bottom of the slope. The south street continued however, bottoming out and climbing again to another crest. The parallel being a main road and not so icy, you could get to the crest and turn around easily enough Then the job was to charge back down, getting enough momentum to get back to the original crest where Lee Road started downhill.
Once you made this and were back at Lee, it was time for another slide downhill riding the brake and picking your spot to turn into your driveway on the right. Do this right and you were home again, inside your own driveway and not bogged down in the snow piled up by snowplows at the entrance. Anyone who liked roller coasters was bound to appreciate the whole thing, particularly the wild ride downhill then zooming up scrambling to get to the top of the hill where you would be in reach of your own goatpath home. Doing it in the dark with the tires grabbing the ice made you wish there could have been an audience.
As I recall, the coldest day of the 20th Century came during the 1970’s and that must have been the one where our whole family got together to push our main car into the garage to keep it from freezing. While everyone else got in back and pushed I stayed in front with a claw hammer chopping away at the ice underfoot to advance the car a few inches at a time. I did not recite the poem about the snow, the snow, the beautiful snow filling the fields and the hills below.
Well, all this seems like ancient history now. No blizzards anymore, no narrow paths on the roads to be followed until you got to your exit where you tried to generate enough momentum to get you through it to the streets, no rocking the car to get it out of the drift, no Yukon trailblazing to get to your igloo where you intended to remain for the rest of the month -- except for a spot of shoveling here and there, maybe with one of those snowblower things that looked like they might be fun. Just because you were too old for snowmen didn’t mean that you couldn’t get some laughs out of the freezing weather and the howling wind and the icy ground and blinding snow and everything else that went to make up the…winter wonderland.
Later on we’ll conspire
As we dream by the fire
To spend the next season
The Florida Keys in
Away from the winter wonderland. | |
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