Village Squire, 1978-01, Page 40
memor es
BY KEITH ROULSTON
I'm getting old and grumpy about winter like most people I
know. The car won't start, I grumble. The car gets stuck, I
grumble. I have an appointment to go somewhere and the snow
is coming down like an avalanche and the wind is howling past
the window and I grumble.
It's hard to remember now that I once loved winter. I loved it
with a passion. I was out revelling in the first snow and watched
the last snowbank dwindle in spring with a feeling of sadness.
Winter had so many pleasures in our neighbourhood. While
we had few of the gadgets and gimicks others took as a normal
part of life on our place, we did seem to have all the things that
made winter enjoyable. Our place, though perhaps not the best
farm in the neighbourhood, was certainly the best winter
playground and the neighbourhood kids spent a good deal of
time there.
There was, first of all, the best tobogganing hill for a mile in
either direction along the concession. In early Christmases,
however, it wasn't toboggans but sleighs we got. Some people
got the kind with the skinny metal runners and the handlebar
that was supposed to help you change directions but somehow
never worked. Those sleighs may have been great on city streets
with icy surfaces and little snow, but on a hillside in the snowbelt
they might as well have given us flypaper to slide down the hills
on. I was luckier. The first sleigh that I can remember had wide
wooden runners with a strip of metal down the centre of each. It
provided the best of both worlds, going like crazy on the ice, but
not sinking so deeply in the snow either. Still, when the snow
was soft and pilled two feet deep on the hillside, the sleigh
moved about as fast as a boot stuck in the mud.
Little wonder then that the arrival of the toboggan was greeted
with joy something akin to the second coming. The craft had
been invented of course by the Indians but just seemed to be
catching on with children about the time I was 10 or so. It solved
the problems of the deep snow completely because it was so
wide. particularly when it was carrying people as light as we
were. Even if the snow was very deep and the toboggan wouldn't
2,VILLAGE SQUIRE/JANUARY 1978.
slide well, it was wide enough that a few trips down the hill
(pushing along side with our hands if necessary) would pack
down a path and it would be clean sledding the rest of the way.
We didn't always need toboggans of course. If the opportunity
arose and there was no real sleighs available. we showed our
inventiveness. The one room school house we would normally
have gone to had been closed because it was in a state of
disrepair. Instead we were taken into town on the bus that took
the high school students to their school and we attended the town
public school.
We had to walk to the highway to catch the bus each day, a
walk of a mile or so for myself and my closest friends. The
trouble was that on stormy days the bus would often have trouble
getting through some of the back roads before it got to where we
were to be picked up and it would be late. Kids. faced with time
on their hands, are bound to come up with something ingenious.
The something we came up with was an unorthodox manner of
sleighriding. The desks in the old school were the big. double
kind. Most had long since been broken by vandals old and
young. We discovered that the seats, well polished by a
half -century of backsides, were very slippery. Across from the
old school was one of the best sleighriding hills around. So we
soon put two and two together and instead of standing huddled
in the cold, we had a glorious time sliding down the hillside on
the remnants of the school desks. Sure beat the normal use of the
old boards, we'd joke.
The time passed quickly in fact so quickly that we didn't
realize that the bus had come and gone. The older girls and the
high school students either couldn't get our attention or thought
it was a good joke, but we were left, about six or seven of us, all
alone.
Sheepishly we walked back to the nearest farm and explained
what had happened. We were driven to town and red-faced
sneaked into the back of the class. At least we tried to sneak but
of course with the creak of the old door, every face turned to
look. That school itself had many a pleasant winter memory.
There was a large hill on the school yard that connected what we