How lovely it was...

                by Liz Flaherty

Helen suggested talking about winter memories today, which caused me to frown at my keyboard for a while. Thinking.

I don’t mind winter. I won’t say I love it, and I’m never sorry to see it end, but

I don’t actually mind it. It’s not hot, for one thing. For another, there are no bugs—or hardly any. It is a time that fully embraces the by-the-quart eating of soup. All kinds of soup. It is a time of snow. Before you can object to that, let me qualify that by adding that as long as the wind is not blowing, the roads are cleared, and there is no ice involved, I love snow. If I were an artist I’d paint snowscapes all the time. I’d do it while I was inside, of course. I don’t actually want to go out in it.

         

But we used to. Our kids, you see, played winter sports. As people who never played organized sports of any kind, we were never sure exactly how this happened, but one son played basketball, our daughter played volleyball, and the other son played football. (I know that technically, football is a fall sport, but when you’re sitting on the bleachers in the snow watching your kid slide around on a white gridiron, it feels like winter.)

          With sports comes quality cuisine. Nachos, hot dogs, popcorn, candy bars,

hot chocolate—did I mention nachos? Sports are also good exercise for athletes’ parents. At our school, the home side is always the Other Side. This means walking roughly four miles around the end of the football field to the home bleachers. Then four miles back to get the blanket you left in the car.

          Basketball and volleyball offer fitness opportunities, too. If you sit on the top row of bleachers, you get to lean against the wall. Never mind that there’s a reason those are called nosebleed seats and that your knees—well, okay, my knees—are ready for me to sit down about a row and a half up from the floor.

          Winter sports are hard on your voice. Yelling at officials who in no way

understand the game they’re officiating. Yelling some more—and possibly spilling popcorn on everyone below you—when your particular athlete does something outstanding. Yelling at a parent across the floor or field who calls your athlete a name.

          It’s been years. My kids played in the 1980s and early 90s. But those memories are still some of the best, the sharpest, the sweetest.

          How about you? Any winter memories you’d like to share? 

          Merry Christmas!

by Helen DePrima

I can’t imagine I can contribute any new thoughts about Christmas. My cards are sent, gifts bought, tree decorated. Now I can concentrate on surviving the rest of the winter. I don’t ski or skate or snowshoe; my winter sport is keep a path shoveled between the back door and the bird feeder.

But except for my childhood when the rare snowfalls in Kentucky brought out my

grandparents’ antique sleigh pulled by our old pinto Mothball, I’ve spent most of my life in places where snow is celebrated rather than tolerated.

After high school, I lived ten years in Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado without once skiing down a slope. My experience with snow focused more on keeping my VW Beetle on the mountain roads between Visiting Nurse appointments. Creeping down an unmarked single-lane from the high country once in a snow storm, I vowed never again to schedule a winter house call without first checking the forecast. The wet blacktop winding through Poudre Canyon, when I slid down the last switchback, looked like my hope of heaven.

After my husband graduated from vet school, I should have insisted on settling where winter lasted maybe a month around Christmas. Instead, we’ve spent the last forty years in New Hampshire. I get through time between Christmas and the end of mud season by poring over seed catalogues, by starting a quilt and finishing a manuscript. I have a fire in the wood stove and my laptop on the corner of my lap not taken up by my Maine Coon. Let it snow.