Snow Stories

Time for some snow stories, with all this wonderful winter weather we've been having!

There's a lot of controversy (perhaps rightfully so) these days about pulling kids on sleds behind vehicles. But Dad used to pull my brother and me (by turns) on a little sled behind the van. After it had snowed, we'd go around on the snowy dirt roads in our part of town. It was fun, and exciting. But I remember once Dad turned a corner (he wasn't going real fast), and the sled went to a deep drift in the ditch and turned over. I went face-first into the drift, and my mouth got packed full of snow! So Dad stopped and came back and helped me up. There I stood, crying, with my mouth full of snow. Have you ever cried with your mouth full of snow? It's sad and hilarious at the same time! I think if I hadn't been crying, I would've laughed.

Of course I'd play in the snow in the yard. My snowmen never did turn out very round - the snow would come up in huge layers as I rolled it, sometimes with old grass stuck to it. So I'd have to really do some filling-in to get it to look like anything decent. But it was fun. And I was outside, out of Mom's hair.

When I was a first-grader, we had a blizzard roll in one day during school. To our surprise, it had lightning and thunder in it. That was sure unexpected. After school, Dad told me that lightning had struck a house south of town and it burned down. That seemed odd to me for a long time, that a house could get struck by lightning in the middle of a snowstorm, and burn down.

Last spring, my home area had a HUGE blizzard with a foot or more of snow. I remember having 2 or 3 such storms when I was growing up. One storm back then really socked things in. Drifts were huge. People literally had to dig out. We were finally able to get out in the van later on, and we went uptown to see what it looked like. One man was out in front of a business on the highway, shoveling a path. If I remember right, the snow drift was maybe 5 or 6 feet tall. I have the picture we took somewhere. If we get a scanner, I'll try to find the photo and add it here. As a kid, it seemed like a vast amount of snow! Once we got back to school, one classmate told of helicopters dropping hay bales to stranded cattle.

One really fun time was when my brother and I went out back and had a HUGE, all-out snowball fight. We started with normal snowballs. By the time the "war" was in full-force, we were heaving huge slabs of snow at each other!

Another fun time was when I was a little older, and was just out tromping around the yard while it was snowing. We had cats. I stood in our big tin garage out of the weather, and watched two of them romp and play in the driveway. It was as if they knew I was watching them, and they really put on a show! They'd hunch down in a rut, get ready to pounce, then they'd ambush each other and run around like crazy. While they played, it was really rather quiet out, and I could hear the snow hitting that tin roof. It was like a skillet quietly sizzling. It was peaceful and relaxing, and I stood there and watched those cats play for the longest time.

And of course you can't talk about snow without at least mentioning all the layers you have to put on to stay warm. I also really remember my gloves getting soaked. I'd finally come in the house and peel those gloves off and lay them on top of the washing machine to dry. My poor, red, numb fingers took a long time to thaw out! Hot cocoa certainly helped.