“Back in my day they never called off school, even when the snow was three feet deep! And we walked uphill to school through blizzards! Then we walked uphill back home!”
Oh, the exaggerations we (all) are prone to when we reminisce about the snows of our childhoods.
Human memory is a strangely alterable and adaptable thing. Without our consciously realizing it, even our most steadfast long-held memories are constantly being reshaped and reformed by time, age, our brain chemistry, and our social interactions with others.
However, it truly does seem to me that my generation got outside and played in the snow more than today’s kids. That appears to be an undeniable fact. When snow fell our way back in the day, we stayed out in it for hours at a time; sleigh riding, snow man building, snow ball fighting - and in my case, hiking in it, just for the sheer thrill of it (as I still do today - at the drop of virtually every snowfall we ever have in these here parts).
If I do see kids out playing in the snow today, it seems they rarely stay out very long. “You’ll catch a cold out in the snow!” I hear many a parent rail. (Which, of course, is not going to happen out in the snow, as viruses don’t live in the snow. They thrive inside, where it’s warm. But so many people don’t seem to know that.)
It also snowed more back when I was a child. Quite a bit more. This statement is not a wistful twisting of my childhood memories - but a recorded scientific fact.
I can recall being out of school for snow the entire month of January one year (maybe 1970) - which may indeed involve some wistful twisting of my own memory, but I’m still bettin’ it’s “pretty close” to a literal fact. Yes, we paid dearly for that snowy month at home on many a Saturday come springtime, when we made up school for our time missed. Oh, but in my memories it was so worth it!
It seemed to me that everyone visited their neighbors more often back then, even in the dead of winter. Or so it surely seems to me now. I can vividly smell the apple pie my mother would bake to take to a new neighbor, even if she had to walk through that three feet of snow. Or was it four?
It’s odd how fact and fiction often intertwine, isn’t it? And as time does its dance on us - they can often become difficult to discern. Such is the way of the wonderfully creative human mind, it seems. Even among the most steadfastly honest of us.
I recall so clearly that Dad would sometimes get me out of bed early when it snowed a lot. I can still hear him say, “Go run and grab the two snow shovels out of the barn, Benny!” After which we both promptly walked up and down our neighborhood street, before the sun rose, to clear driveways and walkways for any elderly or needy neighbor. Heck, there was even a beautiful single mom neighbor, on whom I had a harmless pre-adolescent crush. I always looked forward to her coming out and giving us each a big ol’ bear hug.
Of course, there were those in the neighborhood who would gossip like crazy when Dad and I shoveled the young divorced single mom’s driveway. Dad didn’t care. Neither did my mom. In fact, she encouraged him to do so, “The busybodies will wag their tongues, but you go ahead and help that lady, Don Talley. And take Benny with you. Everybody needs hugs. Show him that we don’t judge people for bein’ different.” (The reader should keep in mind that divorced single moms were much more rare in any neighborhood back then.)
When the snow blows nowadays, it’s not hard to see that kids tend to stay in and stare at their electronic gadgetry for hours on end. Oh, but what thrills they are missing! When I taught elementary school and it began to snow, we all immediately scampered outside the classroom, with or without our jackets and coats … and took a run in the spitting snow. Yes, it was cold. No, none of us caught a cold directly from being out in the cold.
We also did a bonafide “snow dance” outside together whenever we decided we might want school to get called off for snow. Somehow it snowed within twenty-four hours every single time we “snow danced” together. That would be forty-eight times over the course of my teaching career. No, we didn’t get enough snow to get out of school all those times. Maybe half the time. But it did snow (at least a tiny bit) every single time. Any meteorologist would envy our record.
When the skies grew grey in wintertime, my colleagues would often come up to me uttering the heartfelt plea, "Mr. Talley, will you please take the kids out and do the snow dance?"
Indeed, our snow dance worked like a charm. Forty-eight dances. Forty-eight times the Great Spirit sent the little ones snow as a reward for their sincere efforts.
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