I was just thinking the other day, “Hey it’s already February and we really haven’t had much snow.” And then…BLAMMO! It’s a winter wonderland! Outside the window, it’s the kind of snowfall that looks like someone is standing on the roof shaking out an enormous bag of feathers in slow motion. Every horizontal surface is topped with a wispy white layer of snow that grows precariously taller by the minute. When I open the back door to let Bolt out to take a whizz, he prances across the deck and then stops mid-step to lift his snout to the sky and sniff and lick like we used to do when we were children and tried to catch the falling flakes on our tongues; claiming each one tasted delicious and unique. I can honestly say I don’t miss snow all that much— and yet I do have an occasional flurry of fond memories for the stuff.
When I was 5, I’d get up at zero-dark thirty to ride shotgun with my father when he went out snow plowing in his red and white International Scout. The vinyl bench seat was brittle in the pre-dawn cold and I could see my breath in the air, mixing with the smoke from his Lucky Strike smoldering in the dashboard ash tray. As we drove up Irene Road, I’d put two empty fingers to my lips, take a deep drag on my invisible Lucky, and exhale “smoke” toward the frosty windshield.
Eyeing my ridiculous “homage to cool” with a sideward glance, my father would growl “If we’re both gonna be smoking in here, I’m gonna have to open the windows.”
The mere suggestion of rolling down the ice-covered glass, was all the incentive I needed to stub out my imaginary “smoke” in the dashboard ashtray and choke back the perfect wispy ring I was about to exhale. Was that a glimmer of a grin on my father’s face? I couldn’t tell.
The first stop on our route was my father’s Sohio station, where the gas pumps were marooned on cement islands in a pristine sea of white yet unscarred by tire tracks. Once the gas station was clear, we’d do the funeral home across the street, a couple of church parking lots, and finally the driveway and parking lot of the local YMCA.
Eyeing my ridiculous “homage to cool” with a sideward glance, my father would growl “If we’re both gonna be smoking in here, I’m gonna have to open the windows.”
The mere suggestion of rolling down the ice-covered glass, was all the incentive I needed to stub out my imaginary “smoke” in the dashboard ashtray and choke back the perfect wispy ring I was about to exhale. Was that a glimmer of a grin on my father’s face? I couldn’t tell.
The first stop on our route was my father’s Sohio station, where the gas pumps were marooned on cement islands in a pristine sea of white yet unscarred by tire tracks. Once the gas station was clear, we’d do the funeral home across the street, a couple of church parking lots, and finally the driveway and parking lot of the local YMCA.
Shortly after sunrise, we’d skid to a slushy stop in front of Amy Joy Donuts; an odd, triangular building with orange and aqua trim that looked like a rejected I.M. Pei design for Howard Johnson’s. In the winter, the tall glass facade would fog over from the collective breath of other early risers sipping hot coffee, munching oven-fresh donuts, and smoking cigarettes. As we walked down the row of butt cracks perched on stools, my father greeted everyone bellied up to the counter like we were on the set of Cheers.
The conversation was adult, colorful and cacophonous, and I soaked it all in as I spun the stool in nauseating circles while I awaited my donut and hot chocolate. Without fail, the beehive hairdo of whip cream bobbing in the mug made it impossible to sip without lathering up my face; a dilemma that amused everyone sitting at the counter but me. Despite a vast selection of icings and sprinkles and fillings, I seldom strayed from my “house favorite,” a French cruller so light, it's how air would taste if it could be deep fried and lightly glazed. I could make a single one last fifteen minutes; slowly pulling it apart and nibbling it piece-by piece while my father held court discussing rising gas prices, falling snow, and the steady plight of the Cleveland Browns.
If I finished eating before he finished talking, I might wander over to the glass case and graze in wonder at the assortment of bakery that towered behind the glass in front of me. Sometimes, if I was lucky—and my father needed more time to finish his caffeine-fueled tirade against the mayor of Lyndhurst—a Maple Stick would accompany my hot chocolate instead of a cruller. The Amy Joy Maple Stick was a flattened log of dough as big as my forearm that was injected with creamy vanilla custard and topped with a brittle maple glaze. One of those delicacies could keep me busy for half an hour and inevitably trigger a sugar-rush of stool-spinning that signaled it was time to go.
Back in the Scout, we'd head for home as the rest of the city began to awaken. Of course my father couldn't pass a snowbound driveway belonging to anyone he knew without a quick detour. He made light of this good deed, saying “We can't just drive by with a plow on our truck." But I knew there were plenty who did, or wouldn't think of doing it without payment. From my privileged spot inside the chilly cab, I would wave to our neighbors standing in their doorways as we darted in and out of their driveways; quickly sparing them from hours of shoveling. They responded with raised mugs of morning coffee: a salute of appreciation and love that made me shiver with pride for the man behind the wheel.
Back in the Scout, we'd head for home as the rest of the city began to awaken. Of course my father couldn't pass a snowbound driveway belonging to anyone he knew without a quick detour. He made light of this good deed, saying “We can't just drive by with a plow on our truck." But I knew there were plenty who did, or wouldn't think of doing it without payment. From my privileged spot inside the chilly cab, I would wave to our neighbors standing in their doorways as we darted in and out of their driveways; quickly sparing them from hours of shoveling. They responded with raised mugs of morning coffee: a salute of appreciation and love that made me shiver with pride for the man behind the wheel.
Snowstorms could arrive in Northeast Ohio without warning as early as Halloween, and linger as late as Mother’s Day. As a result, nobody was more creative at incorporating long underwear into Halloween costumes than my mom. My brother and I had long-johns dyed in a variety of colors to accommodate nearly every superhero: blue for Superman, red for Spiderman and black for Batman. We were the best costumed and warmest dressed kids trick-or-treating on Irene Road. Of course, once the Ohio winter settled in, those long johns became required attire—not just clever costume frills—no matter what their color.
When we weren’t constructing snow forts with a tunnel system so elaborate even a gerbil might get confused, we went sledding in the park behind our house on “mountains” literally the size of mole hills. There was also a parking lot that the fire department would fill with water and transform into an enormous skating rink; with hockey skates relegated to one end and figure skates situated at the other. The ice rink was our winter baby-sitter, and under its supervision we would skate late into the night, working up a sweat that forced us to shed layers of clothes even as temperatures dropped and our wet hair froze into a tangle of icy spikes. Some nights, fat flakes of snow would drift down through the pitch-black sky, and blanket the ice so quickly, we’d have to suspend play while a group of skaters with shovels zipped around the lot in full Zamboni mode.
When I was in grade school a “snow day" just meant we couldn’t ride our bikes to school. Those were also days that we probably shouldn’t have been allowed to play outside, but lunch-hour recess was a guaranteed sixty-minute respite for the faculty, and a subzero extravaganza in the snow for the kids. Nothing got in its way. After wolfing down a quick brown bag lunch at our desks, we were marched out of the building and left to our own devices on the snow swept arctic waste land that was the enormous church parking lot behind the school. Regardless of the weather, the doors were locked from the inside and they remained that way for an hour. Some kids huddled together by the doors, and begged Sister Mary Cruelty to let them in. The rest of us did our best to keep warm by devising crazy games to play like Run-Across. Never heard of Run-Across? Think of it as an extreme version of Red Rover. Imagine a snow-packed parking lot about half the length of a football field. At one end, as many as 40 boys representing grades 5-8 are lined up across the “touch line." In the middle of the lot stands a lone tackler whose job it is to bring down runners sprinting from one side of the the lot to the other. Tackled runners then help bring down other runners until no runners are left. The last runner was, of course, completely obliterated by the entire group in a frenzied pile-on that often resulted in blood and sometimes broken bones (neither of which is enough to get the back door unlocked). The handicap, of course, were the snow boots most of us were forced to wear over our shoes. They weren't exactly built for speed. Fortunately my mom was amenable to the idea of hiking boots—even in their pre-Gortex stage of development—being a reasonable substitute. The nuns of course didn’t like the idea. Shoes were shoes, and boots were footwear you left in the hallway so you didn't tramp melting snow into the classroom. That proviso lasted until my mother saw the state of my socks. With one fell swoop of a handwritten note “from the desk of Donna Collins," I was back in business running for my life across the frozen tundra of St. Clare's parking lot with half the junior high clomping after me.
As we got older, the hills in Lyndhurst Park grew smaller so even daredevil acts of stupidity like standing backwards on a sled became less entertaining. Eventually we graduated from the hills in the park to the “mountains” at Manakiki; a golf course so vast, you could easily venture deep into the 36-hole course, stake out sole ownership of a slope, and never see another group of sledders the entire day. Of course the older we got, the more venturous we became—hurtling down the hills on anything we could lay our hands on. Not content with the lethal speed of our Flexible-Flyers with highly-waxed runners, we also took to the snow-covered hills with enormous inner tubes courtesy of Collins Sohio, aluminum saucers like a slick paella pan with plastic handles, stolen high school cafeteria trays, and in a pinch even plastic trash bags. My all time favorite though was the totally uncontrollable plastic kiddie pool that sat six uncomfortably. The fact that none of us never suffered a broken limb is beyond amazing. I remember one time screaming down a treacherous golf cart path that unexpectedly bottomed out around a blind curve in front of three-foot wide irrigation ditch. With no time to abort, I flew over the ditch with Knievel-like grace; hitting the opposite bank with such force I expected the sled to splinter into pieces beneath me. The cheers of my idiot friends who had given me the totally unnecessary bobsled-velocity push at the top of the hill was all I needed to dust myself off, grab the rigid clothesline that looped through the handles of the sled, and trudge back up to the top of the path to tempt fate once again. Adult supervision had yet to be invented and neither had an all-terrain golf cart, so with no one coming to tell us the course was closing and it was time to go home, we would sled until the heavy winter dusk began to settle in and the frozen flares on our jeans knocked solidly against our boots like dull thudding bells. As we trudged back towards the first tee, more like weary arctic explorers dragging dog-less sleds at the end of a long expedition, the warm glow of the pro shop beckoned to us from across the hills. Inside was a payphone to call home for a ride, and 15¢ styrofoam cups brimming with the most welcome winter elixir: real hot chocolate that had been ladled from a 40 gallon pot of milk and Hershey's chocolate syrup simmering on a stove all day. A cool blast of whip cream concealed the unnerving layer of skin floating on the surface of the drink and brought the temperature down just enough to keep the styrofoam cup from melting in your hand.
These days, the rare heavy snowfall always reminds me specifically of two other things. The first is the beautiful prose that appears in the final paragraph of The Dead; the last story in James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Heavy snowfall also reminds me of this Happy Medium Song of the Day. The first time I heard this song I was stretched across the two beds in the second floor room I shared with my brother, staring out the window and listening to the radio. It had begun to snow again. Snow was falling fast and thick; blanketing the neighborhood in smooth rolling layers of white that erased all details of the landscape. I watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The parade of plows rumbling down our street was fighting a losing battle. Snow was general all over Ohio. To the south of Lyndhurst, the campus of Kent State University must have been experiencing similar weather. The low, soft-spoken voice of the DJ who was hosting my favorite late night experimental radio show known as Fresh Air cued up the next song, and the gentle, fluttering opening notes swirled from one side of my oversized Koss headphones to the other like the sound of Joyce's snow falling faintly through the universe. No other song makes me think of snow like “Silently Falling” from Chris Squire’s 1975 solo album, Fish Out of Water. Squire, who earned the nickname "Fish" from band mates who grew restless waiting for him to finish long baths, was the bass player in the British progressive rock band, Yes for 45 years before he passed away in 2015. In the pantheon of bass guitarists he is amongst my favorite and “Silently Falling” was, and still is, the perfect soundtrack for an enchanting snowfall.
So even if your current February forecast is unseasonably mild and there’s no prospect of snow in sight, close your eyes, and listen to this Happy Medium Song of the Day. Maybe it will transport you back to your favorite sledding hill, ice rink or other winter memory like it always does for me. (Please use the comments box to share your thoughts.)
So even if your current February forecast is unseasonably mild and there’s no prospect of snow in sight, close your eyes, and listen to this Happy Medium Song of the Day. Maybe it will transport you back to your favorite sledding hill, ice rink or other winter memory like it always does for me. (Please use the comments box to share your thoughts.)