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| Whoa, there is so much potential sitting right here laced with gravel and dreams |
There seemed to be more snow in the 80's. Now they just push the
snow off to the side of the road in one continuous slushy mess. Back then the snowplows pushed the snow out of the road into huge
beautiful off-white mountains. These were the perfect enticement to grab
a sled and go sledding. Much like the false promise of a jumping into
a pile a leafs, you hit bottom before the fun could begin.
What they were good for was making snow forts. Every year we would go out and try to make an igloo by rolling balls of snow and stacking them, this is impossible. I suspect an Inuit prank to waste the time of unsuspecting kids from small western towns. When we had a huge pile of snow already in place all we had to do was dig and in an hour or two we would have a snow fort death trap. I would take old appliance parts and stick them into the wall of our snow cave to simulate a technical control center. Making all the necessary sounds with my mouth and pretend that our little base was always in deep crises and I had to make noises and flip switches to hold the catastrophe at bay.
About November every year, my aunt and grandmother would buy us all new coats and gloves and give them to us at a party they called 'little Christmas'. By the middle of winter those gloves would be long gone, lost or destroyed. To protect our hands from the cold we used to grab a pair of socks out of the big laundry basket we always had full of unmatched pairs. We would slip those on our hands for mittens. If you are familiar with socks or the function of mittens you may have realized the major flaws in our plan, soak through and the lack of a thumb. The socks would be sopping wet in 15 minutes and we would bring them in and put them on the wood stove and freshen up our hand-wear. When my dad would come home at the end of the day he would have something irrational to say about how he didn't have any socks for work because we had used sixty pairs for mittens and that if we couldn't keep track of our gloves then we couldn't use his socks for mittens.
Can't? I think a quick look around at the piles of soggy socks in the living room will show you that it was not only possible, but the Fait is already Accompli as the French say.
What they were good for was making snow forts. Every year we would go out and try to make an igloo by rolling balls of snow and stacking them, this is impossible. I suspect an Inuit prank to waste the time of unsuspecting kids from small western towns. When we had a huge pile of snow already in place all we had to do was dig and in an hour or two we would have a snow fort death trap. I would take old appliance parts and stick them into the wall of our snow cave to simulate a technical control center. Making all the necessary sounds with my mouth and pretend that our little base was always in deep crises and I had to make noises and flip switches to hold the catastrophe at bay.
About November every year, my aunt and grandmother would buy us all new coats and gloves and give them to us at a party they called 'little Christmas'. By the middle of winter those gloves would be long gone, lost or destroyed. To protect our hands from the cold we used to grab a pair of socks out of the big laundry basket we always had full of unmatched pairs. We would slip those on our hands for mittens. If you are familiar with socks or the function of mittens you may have realized the major flaws in our plan, soak through and the lack of a thumb. The socks would be sopping wet in 15 minutes and we would bring them in and put them on the wood stove and freshen up our hand-wear. When my dad would come home at the end of the day he would have something irrational to say about how he didn't have any socks for work because we had used sixty pairs for mittens and that if we couldn't keep track of our gloves then we couldn't use his socks for mittens.
Can't? I think a quick look around at the piles of soggy socks in the living room will show you that it was not only possible, but the Fait is already Accompli as the French say.
