It is snowing ever so lightly this evening as I sit at my window. My thermometer’s mercury hovers somewhere in the upper teens, a refreshingly balmy night when compared to those of a week ago when it seemed as though my breath froze in midair before dropping to the snowcrust in a lump.
My grandfather, Roy, was a big proponent of a good, hard freeze in midwinter; I often heard him say that the deep cold killed off all the bugs that ailed us, that it put color in our cheeks, that it helped us appreciate the warmth of our furnaces and stoves. He was one of the breed who put his long johns on when the days first turned cold in late fall, then left them on for the winter’s duration — minus washing time, of course — until spring. He was a rough old bird, who on the coldest and dimmest of January mornings still ran his traps and walked his dog.
But the icy reach of the bitter north wind that whipped across our neighboring fields last week has done more than simply bring my granddad’s words back to me. I have many fond cold-weather memories, scenes from the past I replay in my head when the snow drifts and schools close and icicles hang from the gutters as if they are racing one another to the ground.
Like most of us, I imagine that my first good, cold-weather memories involve sledding. My cousins, who lived across the road from us, owned not only great, old sleds — one was big enough for three riders — but also a nice piece of topography begging for their use. We — my brother, John, and sister, Lora, and cousins, Roger and Renee — made that hill our own personal ski resort, taking its measure, riding everything from my uncle’s coal shovel to our “Flexible Flyer” to an old bicycle, the latter used only when we had mustered the courage to take the risk of nastier spills.
My brother and cousin, five years older and wiser, soon graduated to even more adventurous contraptions. They often chained an ancient and dented car hood behind my uncle’s gray Ford tractor and pulled us up and down the County Line Road in what we felt was our own personal sleigh. It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, yet it paled by comparison to the homemade snowmobile the pair cobbled together and that I first test drove. Always interested in being included in their more mature forms of entertainment, I volunteered — at least didn’t resist their suggestions — to be at the controls on its maiden voyage. That, too, took place in the middle of that icy country road, but it really did nothing more than sit in one place and vibrate…
During the hardest freezes, my sister and cousins would head down the road to a neighbor whose farm pond froze. We had but one pair of ice skates among us, and those fit Roger’s pontoon-like feet, so the hard, plastic soles of our black-buckled, rubber snow boots had to serve us in their place. Although we never really had seen a real hockey game, we had played enough of a playground version in elementary school, using plastic pucks and sticks, to know what needed to be done.
On one of those occasions, my sister fell through the ice, giving us all an image that is still etched in our brains. We had done little more to test the ice that day than step out onto it a few inches at a time. I remember that I was wrapping a scarf around my face when I turned to see her feet suddenly go out from beneath her, her scream urgently real.
When we got to her, she was up to her armpits in brown water — the pond wasn’t very deep — but we knew that she’d freeze if we didn’t extract her and head for home. Renee and I carried her awhile, and if I’m correct, pulled her down the road on a sled, but we didn’t get her home before her pants and boots and coat had frozen stiff.
Our house was a warm one. Heated by a creaky oil furnace, and eventually a wood stove, we also sat near our living room’s gas log after our baths to watch television or eat popcorn or to do both. But for warmth, real heat, all we needed to do was head to my grandparents’ house. They lived just up the road from us, and they heated their place with a huge coal furnace whose ductwork stretched out of sight into the basement’s crawlspaces like tentacles. Besides the shelves holding my grandmother’s home-canned beans and corn, and her decrepit washing machine, their basement had a coal room, filled each year by a truck that backed up to a ground-level window to noisily deposit its load.
I loved to stoke that furnace with my grandmother, tossing in paving brick-sized chunks of coal that would snap and pop and trail an oddly pleasant first smoke. We’d come away from the furnace’s open door with red faces and arms, our hands kept clean by clown-sized cotton gloves she left on a nearby shelf.
It was in the winter that we built snow forts atop our hill, tunneled our way across a spot in our drive that always drifted deep between two raised banks, and laughed at the frost that coated Dusty’s (our Shetland pony) whiskers. I ice-fished with my grandpa on old Mr. Brant’s coal mine pond, reinvented our back yard as Green Bay or Minnesota or Chicago and ran wild with my Dick Butkus football, and often hunkered down with a good book and a blanket after a day of playing had worn me out.
I have learned over the years that the older I get, the more scenes like these play back in my head, and that the memories of such things aren’t so much about what actually happened as they are about the faces and laughter of the times.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. His book, “The Off Season: The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford” is on sale through Mike’s Web site at www.mikelunsford.com or in many area stores.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: Remembering the frost on Dusty’s whiskers
- Mike Lunsford
-
-
A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
-
Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
-
Raw: Tornadoes Spotted in Kansas
Probe Begins After Conn. Commuter Trains Crash
Obama Exhorts Good Deeds by Morehouse Graduates
Winning Powerball Ticket Sold in Florida
NTSB Begins Investigation Into Conn. Train Crash
Raw: Heavy Tornado Damage in Shawnee, Okla
AP CEO: Records Seizure 'Unconstitutional'
Lotto Fever Sweeps the Country
Coffee Run Leads to Hatchet Hitchhiker Arrest
Conn. Commuter Trains Collide; 60 Go to Hospital
One Million Evacuated As Cyclone Hits Bangladesh
Today in History for May 19th
$1 Million in Jewels Stolen at Cannes Film Fest
NM Mom Chases Down Child Abductor
Raw: Germany Protestors Picket Barbie House
Raw: Driver Ejected From Truck, Over Bridge
Raw: Gun Scare Mars Cannes Film Festival
CDC: Fecal Bacteria Common in Swimming Pools
Fmr. IRS Head Insists No Politics in Targeting
Raw: Texas Gov. Flies Over Tornado Damage
Twiggy, the Water Skiing Squirrel
Sailor Surprises His Mom At Her CU Denver Graduation Ceremony
Official: ‘Amazing’ No One Was Killed In CT Train Crash
Coffee Stop Leads To Arrest Of YouTube Sensation Wanted For Murder
Bearded Dragon Reunited With Owner
Marine Reunited with Warzone Companion
Raw: Crash Sends Car Into Fla. Pool
Beyonce Is Pregnant!
SF baseball player overpaid $500,000 RETURNS money -- and team says KEEP IT
Dad returns from Afghanistan, surprises family during Rays' first pitch
See Jennifer Lopez's New $10m Hamptons Mansion
Woman tricked into taking abortion pill
Emma Watson Goes Pantless
IRS scandal: Republicans seek to tie Obama to agency's woes
Play of the Day: Flipping to Safety
Pregnant Kim Kardashian Squeezes Her Swollen Feet Into Stilettos
Top Videos of the Week: Angry Taco Bell Guy, Glacier Moves on House, Dog Hates Baths
