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.

...A 1949 Summer Morning...

My bedroom window had been left open just a crack last night. It was May and although the nights still got quite cool, we'd had a run of very warm weather this spring and everything was coming alive again. I heard the jingle jingle first...then...as they came closer...the clop clop of the huge Belgians' hooves on the gravel road became louder. I rushed to wash my face, brush my teeth, pull on my jeans and get outside to talk with Mr. Redpath.

We lived in a small bungalow on the top of the hill on Fox Street. The house is still there though it's green now rather than white. In high school at St. Thomas I wrote a poem about the little house which, to my absolute surprise, won a prize in a national contest. Across the street was a field of tall grasses, golden rod and milkweed that belonged to the Weber family. Today it's called Weber Hills...an appropriate name, I guess. There were no houses there in 1949...in fact...there were very few houses in the area at all.

Our house was on 10 acres. All the land was open grassland...surrounded by a three-strand barbed wire fence with wooden fence posts that were old even then. There had been beef cattle in the fields when we moved in. One day...trucks came and took them all away. The livestock evidently controlled what grew in the fields due to their grazing... for today...those grassy fields where, as a child on a sunny and warm day, I would lie on my back with my dog and watch the cottony clouds cruise by...have been replaced by fully grown groves of huge trees.

The house sat toward the front of the lot...set back perhaps 75 to 100 feet from the gravel road that Fox Street was then. A long gravel driveway curved around the west side of the house to the back yard where the garage sat. It had a tall sliding door and a wooden plank floor and sat above what had been a small barn for milk cows. Four or five old stanchions were still down there and straw covered the floor. Next to the garage was a very old chicken coop.

Mother had a clothesline toward the back of the yard...it seemed to me to be always full. I can still remember the delicious smell of the clean sheets dried in the sun and almost constant breeze that we enjoyed on top of the hill. My Dad had dug a garden, by hand with a shovel, not far away where we grew our vegetables. It was my job to cultivate it, pull whichever weeds escaped the hoe, and keep it watered. A side benefit of the garden was that it produced a great crop of earthworms, easily found and collected in a coffee can for fishing bait.

Mr. Redpath was a large man, red-faced from working in the sun and wind, with thick, strong hands. It seems to me now that he must have always worn his bib overalls...not the solid blue ones...but the ones with the white pinstripes...like a railroad engineer. His land abutted ours and he was here this morning to plow. His plow was powered by Bob and Jake, two enormous Belgian draft horses...one white...one grey. In fact, all of his farm implements were powered by Bob and Jake.

By the time I got outside, he had already made his first trip down the field...cutting and rolling the sod under the fresh-smelling spring earth...and was on his way back toward Fox Street. As he got closer he waived at me and wished me a good morning! He had a strong, loud voice.

Hi, Mr. Redpath, I said as I walked to the side of the plow that he was riding on...Bob and Jake turned and looked at me for just a second then focused their attention on the field ahead. Hop on, he said and I jumped up beside where he sat...standing on a bar that ran across the rig. He always let me ride along. Could their be anything better in the world!

I looked at his huge hands holding the thick leather reins...two in each hand...and followed them with my eyes up along the horses to their bits. One hand held the right rein of each horse...one hand held the left. He could turn them by pulling on one hand or the other...though the truth be told...they knew when to turn by themselves and he just more or less encouraged them by saying their names. He didn't ever yell that I can remember...and he never got mad at his two powerful helpers.

It was delightful to ride along beside him as we went up and down the fields...the only noise was the jingle of the harness, the sound of the plow tearing the ground, and an occasional grunt from one of the horses. Seldom did a car come down Fox Street in those days...and when one did...the sound of the rocks and gravel bouncing off it gave it away long before it came into sight. Both Mr. Redpath and I would look up...trying to see if we recognized the car. He usually did...there was really no reason for anyone who didn't live around the area to use the road.

Around noon, Mom came over to the side of the field and called me in for lunch. She asked Mr. Redpath if he'd like a sandwich too...but he said that he was almost finished and would go home for lunch but thank you. I hopped off and told him thanks alot for the ride...he smiled and said he'd see me soon.