Snow, -5°, wind, rain, fog, ice, 50°. Yup, it's winter in Maine. My husband and I were born the same year and grew up in the same city. He was raised in a French Catholic family, and I came from a WASP background. But our memories of our childhood winters are very similar. Kids are kids no matter who you are.

     I need to clarify an issue that came up in my critique group after they read my piece. They thought my mother came across as mean. But, you have to remember that these memories are from the point of view of a child. Other kids had cool moms, but not me. Then I grew up and became a mother. Ah...I understand.

Winter

Winter

is cold:     My piano teacher, Dawn Grant, was involved in local music social circles. She occasionally had me and other students play at various venues with her. I was about ten, I performed at the house of a well-to-do local businessman, Frank Winter, who lived on Main Street in Lewiston. When the social time was over I called my mother to come get me, got myself ready, and went outside to wait. I shoved my bare hands in my pockets, hunched up my shoulders against the cold and waited. And waited. And waited, until my hands, feet, ears and nose were frozen. I told myself then that when I grew up I would never be cold again. I lied.

is lonely:  I am the oldest of three children. I suppose if you were to ask them, my younger sister and brother would probably say I was a pain in the neck. But I’m not going to let you ask them. Instead I am going to presume that I was not bothering my brother or sister or even my mother when she made me dress up in boots, scarf, gloves and my gray snow pants and jacket and go out-side. Alone. She told me I couldn’t go back in until I had played outside for a while. Alone. The sky was gray. No other children played in their yards. I lay in the snow and made a snow angel. I may have crossed the small side yard to the stone fireplace and climbed on that for a few minutes. I went back to the door and knocked to go back in. Mother didn’t come. I sat on the stoop to wait. Cold permeated the 1960 snowsuit, not lined with Thinsulate or stuffed with down. Right at that moment I hated winter, and I hated Mother.

hurts:     My dad set up a metal rink on the lawn before winter blew in solid, and filled it with water. Soon, we had our own miniature ice skating surface. I had a friend who was sometimes annoying. Like the day I wore my brand new, pure-white leather figure skates. Neither of us were experts at skating, and that was made very obvious when she couldn’t stop and ran into me. The toe pick of her blade cut into the side of my skate, through the leather, and into my foot. My beautiful skates, made imperfect by one careless move. I’m not sure if I was madder that she damaged my skates and hurt my foot, or that she laughed. I suppose I’ve forgiven her for this indiscretion, but I feel pain whenever I think of this incident.

is fun:     By now, I think you get the point that as a child I was not a fan of winter. I have no memories of doing winter activities with either of my parents, but when it came time for my dad to clean the driveway after a snowstorm, now that was fun. We kids would sit in the snow with our backs to the driveway. Dad would slowly push the snow blower by us and the snow would regurgitate out of the shoot and smack us square in the back We loved the sound and the feel of the snow hitting us. When Dad completed the job, he’d get a shovel and dig out the snow bank at the corner of the driveway and the street and make us a snow house. We’d crawl inside and pretend to be Eskimos, but not for long, because it got cold and boring real soon. 

is the doorway to Spring:     As spring approached–which as a child I never knew when it would happen–I loved the warmer breezes and watching the melting snow trickle down the edge of the streets. I thought I could help spring come sooner if I walked on the snow at the side of the street and break it up by stomping on it. Somehow I still haven’t given up that notion, only now I use the car, and drive along the edges of roads to break up the snow. Must be the same idea my husband has when he goes out at the end of March and shovels snow off the lawn into the street. I think he is crazy when he does that, but I probably should re-evaluate my thinking–he probably has Spring fever, too.

What Do You Remember About Winter When You Were a Kid? (Roger's story)

“I froze my ass off.” He chuckled as he looked guiltily my way for having said a bad word. “Clothing was not as warm as it is today.” He glanced back at the television. “The big thing was our wool mittens collected clumps of snow and ice on them. We wore those black rubber boots with the buckles down the front over our shoes.”

 “We considered the neighborhood to be along Poland Road from where Clover Manor is to Pride Hill Road.”

“We kids in the neighborhood built snow forts in the snow banks. We’d pile up chunks of snow to make the walls. Then, we’d have snowball fights.

“We spent a lot of time sliding down the hill behind Uncle Pete’s. (Pete and Jean Creart lived on top of Pride Hill Road behind the Chabot house on Poland Road.) Mr. Young, an old man who lived on Poland Road, made a sled with a seat on it and nailed it to a set of skis. That’s where I got my idea to make one like it a few years ago.

“Mr. Young had a greenhouse on the side of his garage. In the winter he’d cover the plant boxes with boards and we kids would all sit on those around a wood stove.

“He had a big toboggan that could hold ten kids on it at a time. He also loaned us his long jump skis.  There was a path from his house to the hill. There’d be eight to ten kids at a time playing on the hill.

“Back in those days you could slide from the top of the hill, down where the Auburn Baptist Church gymnasium is now. When it rained on top of the snow, it’d make a nice crust for runner sleds and we could slide all the way to Poland Road.

“Sometimes we’d slide on a car hood we’d taken off some old junk car in the field behind our house. The old hoods had no insulation in them so you sat right on the hood. We’d run and push it down the hill and then jump on it. We had attached a rope to it so we could drag it back up the hill.

“One neighborhood boy, Alan Bouchard, had a store-bought bobsled that two or three kids could ride on at a time. It had four small skis on it, with the front two being moved by handlebars. It didn’t go very good. Neither did aluminum saucers.

          “There were streams in back of our house that would flood, and the whole field would freeze, making a big skating surface, mixed in here and there with tufts of grass sticking up through the ice. When you were little, you’d skate on double runners that you’d strap on to your boots.  I had a pair of brand new hockey skates that I may have gotten from Uncle Bob (his godfather). We played a lot of hockey on that ice. If someone found a broken hockey stick, we’d tape it up and use it.

“At Sacred Heart school we played King of the Mountain on big snow piles, created when the plow pushed the snow from the parking lot into gigantic mountains of snow. A classmate named Bill had polio and walked with crutches. He’d climb up that hill, drop his crutches, and grab onto whoever was “King” at the moment. The force of his body on theirs toppled both of them off the mountain. Someone would get his crutches back down to him and he’d do it over and over again until the end of recess.

“I had to shovel by hand the whole driveway so my father could get into the yard when he came home from work. Once, Dad bought an old tractor that looked kind of like a rototiller. It was tall and square, like the front of a snow blower, with a flat blade in front and you walked behind it. When it ran, I could to do the driveway with that instead of shoveling.

“It broke down a lot, though, so once Dad took it to Marcotte Chevy where he worked (at that time located just beyond the intersection of Minot Avenue and Poland Road) to be repaired. I had to walk all the way up there from home, and then turn around and bring it back to the house. “

He goes back to watching TV, but the little robots in his mind are still hard at work, and in a few minutes, he shares this story:

“This story should be called ‘The Day We Should Have Died.’ I was about twelve or so and my friends, Roger Theberge and Joey Giasson, and I found ourselves on the ice on top of Barker Mill Dam in New Auburn. The ice was nice and clear, but only a few inches thick. I could see right through it. The ice had big air bubbles caught inside. We found a mouse frozen into the ice. As we stood there, though, the ice started to crack, so we all jumped back. We walked across the top of the dam.

“That reminds me of the time I saw a picture at Flanders (a men’s clothing store on Court Street in Auburn) of a cover of Life magazine of three boys jumping off that dam. One boy was still on the dam and two were in mid-air. Many years later when I worked at Gamache and Lessard, the husband of a seamstress who worked for us told me that he was the boy in the picture that was still on the dam. He was still there after the other two boys jumped because he didn’t dare to jump.”

The little robots punched off duty then, and there we no more memories evoked that day.