Searching for the Lost Kid

Across the Fence #376

Fifty degree weather, bare ground, dry roads, I knew it was too good to last. On January 12, winter finally arrived with its cold breath, and wearing a white coat that it left behind. It was just enough to blanket the ground. Since that first snow we’ve had several more close encounters with Old Man Winter. The latest was this morning when he laid down a coating of freezing rain and then dumped a layer of snow on top of the ice to cover up his treachery. I think I’ve had enough of winter now. Bring on the groundhog and let it be an overcast day!

Our driveway is a story unto itself. The wind that always seems to accompany the snow, deposited two-foot drifts in our driveway. It was winter as usual in Sherpeland. Next year I’m putting up a snowfence to try and stop the snow from filling the driveway. It’s worth a try. I wish I could find some snowfence like we had when I was young. It was made with wood laths instead of the orange plastic stuff I see around these days. I still think some old things are better than the new. It’s too bad all those old tobacco laths got buried with the old granary. I could get some flexible wire and string a fence together. I guess that would be more work than just blowing the snow out of the driveway.

There’s something about our driveway that seems to attract snowdrifts like iron to a magnet. In some places the wind will blow the snow away so you can even see the grass. Meanwhile, the driveway has two-foot drifts. It’s always so windy where we live that you don’t need a snowstorm to get snowed in. As long as there’s snow on the ground and wind in the air… we’ve got drifting.

And another thing, what is it about snowblowing that no matter what direction you blow the snow, it always blows back in your face. I look like a snowman when I’m done. Even my glasses get frosted over and icicles hang in my mustache. It doesn’t help that it’s usually dark and 50 below zero when all this takes place. Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but it feels like 50 below. It’s just one of the many joys of enduring winter on Coon Prairie where the wind blows free and the temperature is always colder than the “official” recorded temps.

I guess I need to get in touch with that kid that used to inhabit my body. He loved frolicking in the snow. It’s hard to find him back these days. I wonder if kids today spend as much time playing outside in the snow as we did, or are they inside, watching TV, on the Internet, busy texting, or playing video games. In all fairness to them, we didn’t have any of those devices when we were very young. We didn’t have a TV until I was 10 or 11 years old. Computers, video games, and texting, were not in our vocabulary and unheard of to us.

Those thoughts came about during a phone conversation with Joel Thompson this week. We were neighbors and best friends when we were growing up. In those days you always wore clothes that an older sibling had outgrown. Since I was the oldest child there weren’t any used clothes in our family, so I inherited a lot of his hand-me-down clothes. He was a year older than me. Joel now lives in North Carolina so we don’t see much of each other, but we make use of new inventions like e-mail, that were alien to us when we were students in Smith School.

During our phone conversation, we recalled all the fun we had playing in the snow. We did a lot of skiing together. We wondered if kids still make ski jumps like we did on Birch Hill and many other hills, or is everything organized and supervised by adults these days. Perhaps we could have used a little supervision to keep from getting hurt or killed, but it wouldn’t have been half the fun, or as adventuresome, if adults had been telling us what to do. We were never bored or at a loss of what should we do next.

I recall one time when my brother, David, took a nasty fall off one of our makeshift jumps and hit his head on the hard-packed snow. Joel and I were standing at the top waiting to go down, while David was sprawled out at the bottom of the hill and not moving. We yelled at him to get out of the way so we could jump. The poor guy finally crawled off to the side. It wasn’t until we got to the bottom of the hill that we found out he’d seen stars when he whacked his head. Fortunately all of us were hard-headed Norwegians. David headed right back up the hill for his next jump. Later that day I took a header into the snow, scraped my face, and cut my lip. We wore those cuts, bumps, and bruises as badges of honor.

It was all part of a day’s adventures when we kids created our own fun outdoors in the snow. I need to search for that “inner” kid again and start enjoying all this new snow.

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