Snow Days Plus 70

By D. A. Higgins

     Snow days today for many of us are nothing less than a nuisance and an inconvience. They require hiring someone to plow driveways and perhaps paying a neighbor or a relative to clean sidewalks. If someone lives in a services-provided home, it’s all taken care of for you. Great. Lucky you. But, if you still live in your own home, the snow clearing falls right squarely in the homeowner’s lap. If you’re over age 60 or 70, snow removal can result in a heart attack, a fall on ice breaking something important or incurring frostbitten toes. Chancy, dangerous stuff if you’re old.   

     It always wasn’t that way, remember?

     Snow days (usually accompanied by a day off from school) when we were kids spelled fun. Whether anyone lived in a city apartment or a farmhouse in the country, getting dressed to go outside to play in the snow was an unnecessary waste of time mom insisted on. “You’ll freeze and your legs will fall off if you don’t wear them,” she would say. Sometimes I was able (but not often) to escape wearing the constricting bulbous snow pants: “I won’t be cold, I promise,” was the usual argument, knowing full well I would get wet and cold, making a firm commitment to not complain if my legs fell off. Finally dressed for a polar expedition, I waddled out the door and headed for the shed or garage or basement to dig out the sled. It was a tried and true hand-me-down sled with metal runners and a wooden body with the name of the sled painted in red letters faded with time. The name “Rosebud” doesn’t come to mind as the name of my runner but it was something like “Flexible Flyer” or “Slippery Racer” or maybe it was so well used the name simply wore off and I forgot. Can’t remember but it was well-loved and probable belonged to my brother before me. One thing’s for sure, it flew downhill like the wind. I’m certain my brother waxed the runners as a favor to me and I loved it!

     Running to meet up with the neighborhood kids, towing my trusty runner behind, we headed to the nearest hill to begin our day of careening dangerously fast down the snow covered local Mount Everest. Some kids didn’t have sleds so they used whatever would slide. A wide shovel or an old car hood or even cardboard would get going fast enough to offer thrills and sometimes spills in our effort to feel the wind on our frozen faces. Not flinching once about the possibility of meeting face to face with a fence or a snow bank, we relished the idea of running that risk. It was exhilarating, remember? No fear when you’re a kid. Once in a while the result of the jointure was a bloody nose or worse which of course you never admitted to mom. Climbing back up the hill countless times just to slide down again and again never seemed to tire us out, that is not until our stomachs reminded us it was suppertime. Reluctantly, we ended our day with one more downhill run, gathered up our last bit of kid energy and dragged our wet, cold bodies home. For most of us, a hot meal and a steaming cup of tea with lemon awaited on the supper table. You could smell the goodness wafting in the air even before you opened the kitchen door. In my ethnic home, mom would make delicious soup full of homemade noodles with bits of chicken or beef from the farm, just baked bread and a desert made from scratch. Oh, how good it all tasted! The perfect ending to a perfect snow day.  

     Sometimes it’s hard to conjure up the memories of those days we now call old and good because it’s been a long, long time. But, they really were because we were kids and that’s all we had to do was be kids. Surely kids today have fun on snow days but times have changed as they should. To my way of thinking, they will never know the simple, uncomplicated, worry-free times we knew when snow days offered an opportunity to just be a kid.