A Winter's Morning

In the 40's, most houses were not insulated. Our house, built in the 20's, was no exception. After a hot summer day, we'd lay in bed, windows wide open, praying for a breeze. In the winter, I'd watch the ice form on the window panes and, since my bedroom was in the northwest corner of the house...and the cold arctic winds blew from that direction, I'd sleep as far from the wall as possible, covered by layers of wool blankets.

Our home was heated by an oil furnace...natural gas had not made it's way out into the country. The large tank occupied a corner of the basement with the filler pipe outside, next to the foundation. Normally, the oil man would come to fill the tank once a year, in the autumn...but if the winter was overly cold, he'd come back in January or February...alerted by Dad who'd look at the simple gauge on the top of the tank.

The furnace heated water for the radiators throughout and worked very well. Mom was seemingly always cold so she turned the thermostat up to 75 during the day. Heating bills were not a large problem, however, since the price of fuel oil was merely pennies a gallon. Even on a limited budget, most people had warm houses during those long Minnesota winters.

The air inside the house got extremely dry during the winter. To avoid the nosebleeds and colds, Mom and Dad placed water pans on top of the radiators...the kind that were made for that purpose so that their water chambers fit over and around the radiator's fins. We also used the radiators to dry wet mittens and socks...which gave off a distinctive smell to the room. Leather mittens could burn, however, so they had to be watched carefully.

As I've stated, we lived on a hill overlooking the creek between Long Lake and Lake Minnetonka. The school bus picked me up at the corner of Brown Road and Fox Street, along with Steve and some other kids. This meant I had to walk that quarter mile of road every morning and evening, regardless of the weather.

This particular morning, the snow had started falling before sunrise and already coated the frozen gravel road to a depth of two or three inches when I left the house. I had brown boots that came up about half way to my knees. They had a lining of some kind of fake lambswool but required me to wear only my socks inside. I wore a pair of cotton socks covered by a pair of Dad's wool hunting socks. I carried my school shoes in a plastic bread bag along with my lunch and workbook in another.

Although the wind was blowing out of the northwest, it was not particularly cold out and I had the hood of my jacket pulled tight around my face. It took about 5 minutes to reach the corner where the other kids were already waiting by the row of mailboxes on wooden posts, everyone standing facing the road so that their backs were to the wind.

This wasn't the first snowfall of the season and the snowbanks from the previous plowing filled the ditches on both sides of the road and rose to a foot or so above the roadway.

The bus must have been late because Steve and I got tired of standing there. We stuffed our bags of things into our mailbox...it was the biggest one...and started fooling around. We climbed up the snow banks and slid down on our feet to the road. Then we crossed Fox Street to the southwest corner where the ground fell off into the swamp surrounding the creek. The snowbank was higher here and made for good sliding and some "king of the hill" roughhousing.

We must have been engrossed in our playing, or perhaps our hoods pulled tight around our heads blocked out the sound...but all of a sudden...coming down Brown Road from Long Lake...was a huge truck with a V plow on the front. He was moving at a good clip...the snow shooting out from either side of the plow...as he bore down on Steve and I.

He didn't even see us standing on top of the snow bank. I saw just a glimpse of the truck through the sheet of snow flying out and then...we both were flying backwards toward the creek in an avalanche of heavy snow. It rolled me over and over until I finally stopped, buried under that heavy and hard compressed snow that comes from a plow. Steve was in the same predicament. We struggled and strained to get on top of the now, very deep snow.

We managed to get out and get back over to the bus stop. Our jackets, our boots, and our mittens were packed full of snow. The other kids waiting there made fun of us...and we laughed as well...embellishing the entire experience so as to impress them with our manly fortitude. Of course, we also told everyone at school. Neither of us, however, mentioned it to our Mothers that evening. That would have been unwise.