It’s funny to me the way in which most people complain about winter. In person, on social media…Hell, even the local weatherman talks about a preference for beaches and palm trees. It seems that almost nobody likes the first and last two months of every year. Yeah, I get it…it’s gray and dreary and cold. The days are short and the nights are long. The weather has the potential to involuntarily bind us to shelter and warmth for what seems like months at a time.
I’ve lived in tropical and desert climates for extended periods of time where the seasons NEVER change. Those locations do have quite a few advantages, but overall I always seemed to be acutely aware that something was amiss. But, I don’t think I can accredit my appreciation of winter completely to my travels as an adult. I’ve been like this my whole life. Winter always takes me home.
My neighborhood was on the side of a hill. To the residents, that neighborhood was referred to simply as “The Hill”. If you were downtown and someone asked you about your destination, you were never going “Home”….you were going back to “The Hill”. There was little flat land to be found. Even the vacant lot, affectionately known as “The Field”, where we played baseball and football had a pretty decent incline on the west third of it. Nearly all of the streets were made from bricks produced by President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the late 1930’s. A cross road of those brick streets was known as “The Corner” and that was where wiffle ball, kickball and stick ball games were conducted through the summer months, each corner curb representing a base pad on a baseball diamond. Red brick roads everywhere with the exception of the yellow brick road at the front of the neighborhood that we all called the “Front Street”. I don’t know why that one little 200 yard stretch of road was yellow when the rest of the hill was done in red, but to this day Elton John’s 1973 album makes me nostalgic for my childhood. There was an old basketball hoop hanging on a sheet-metal backboard attached to an old garage in a gravel alley that we called “The Court” and that’s where endless games of H.O.R.S.E and 21 were conducted.
Summers were a flurry of activity on The Hill. The neighborhood in which I was raised was a place where the world was our playground. We used that playground 365 days a year, but the days were long in the summer and we’d be on that playground from first light until we got the sign to go home at the end of the day…when the street lights lit up you’d better get your ass home. We climbed trees, ran through yards, between houses, through the woods and across garage roofs like we owned them all. If we could find some lumber and some old lawnmower wheels we’d find a way to turn that pile of scrap into a downhill racing go-kart….if we couldn’t find wheels, we’d stack some blocks or bricks and use the scrap lumber to make a ramp to jump the bicycles across.
Hindsight being 20/20, our parents and the other residents of The Hill were some of the most understanding, tolerant and forgiving adults I’ve ever known. A lot of times, if you were thirsty, you just stopped at a garden hose and watered down….didn’t really matter who owned the house…you just got a drink and turned the water off and nobody said a word. We snacked from grape vines, apple trees and cherry trees in peoples yards. We really tore the hell out of some of the lawns just playing as rough as we always played, but rarely was an unkind word uttered. They all let us be kids…we felt safe there because they all looked out for us like we were their own flesh and blood…they enabled us to feel like the world was our playground…and I don’t think I can overemphasize the importance of that feeling.
While we’re talking about hindsight…we really kind of developed some special skills on that hill. Ever try to dribble a basketball on gravel or uneven bricks? A hard-hit, one-hop line drive on a baseball field is difficult enough to handle, but try putting the glove to that hot potato playing on an uneven uphill lot. I’m sure most of you have maneuvered a bicycle across wet terrain, but I assure you wet, worn down fifty-year-old bricks covered in loose cinders from the previous winter add a special treachery to the feat that only the most skilled riders can master. Completing a pass of more than five yards when you’re eleven years old is not an easy task…yet we were repeatedly attempting those passes uphill or downhill. Your balance and hand-to-eye coordination had to be exceptional just to navigate the playground and all the activities taking place upon it. We were all fearless in the wilderness. Well…you had to be…a foul ball in The Field was a catastrophe of epic proportions…the game came to a screeching halt while every one of us dug through a thicket until we found the ball. There were a lot of days where that ball was lost forever, and then the scheming would begin…we’d all put our heads together and try to figure out how many returnable Pepsi bottles we’d have to swipe from our parents to redeem at the A&P for the correct amount of money to buy a new ball at Ace Hardware or G.C. Murphy’s.
Summers on The Hill seemed to move at 100 miles an hour. I’m sure there were days we moved from bicycles to stick ball to tag and then to basketball before anyone ever thought about lunch. But Autumn and Winter is what always makes me homesick. I don’t know if it’s the crisp air, the smell of the fallen leaves or maybe the fact that we had all that energy pent up from sitting in school all day and we had limited time to expend it all before the street lights sent us all home. Or it could have been the fact that everything got more difficult in the cold, wet, snow and ice. Maybe a combination of it all. I dunno.
When we were really young, an added dimension of the late season was wet terrain to overcome in neighborhood games like Cowboys and Indians, war, tag and kick-the-can. The cheap sneakers we all wore wouldn’t allow us to get the traction we needed to run and they were definitely no help when it came to stopping once you got going. Most of us chose the “hook-slide” as a method of slowing our momentum when necessary and I think there were times when not a single one of us owned a pair of pants that weren’t grass and mud stained well beyond the cleaning abilities of Tide or Cheer. Bicycles were a year around mode of transportation and entertainment on The Hill. Wet or icy bricks just meant you could “power-slide” your bike further down the street when you locked up the brakes. I can’t tell you how many days we spent raking up piles of maple leaves so we could run and jump into them just so we could rake them back into a pile again. Oh….and no soft earth under that pile of leaves for the kids on The Hill….nope, our dumb-asses would rake that pile up against the concrete curb on the brick street, run up the hill so we could get a better jump at it and then do a swan dive onto a brick road with nothing more to cushion our descent than a pile of leaves. BUT….we all survived it.
As we aged a little, sports became our favorite way of passing the time. Football was sloppy in the fall and winter. I can’t recall how many times I stood on the front porch, nearly naked while Mom rinsed me off with a garden hose before I was allowed in the house to get a shower. Basketball at The Court switched from playing on gravel to playing on mud with some gravel in it. There were days you could get just as muddy playing basketball as you could’ve playing football.
Then came the snow. I hope my mind stays sharp enough that I never forget the snow days. It seemed like most of the neighborhood, including adults, would come out and start working on a sled track that ran from the top of the neighborhood, through two yards, into the street and all the way down to the Front Street. Hazards ranged from a three foot drop off a concrete wall if you went off track to the north, to hedge rows on the south side, to parked cars to the occasional moving car. Scrap lumber and downed tree branches were gathered for a bonfire after dark, thermoses of hot chocolate and packages of hot dogs were brought to the top of the track and we’d eat, drink and laugh as we rode everything from Western Flyer rail sleds to truck inner-tubes down that hill in order to see who could make it the furthest down the track before running out of steam. Igloos would be built in front yards. Snowmen would be erected just so someone could use them as a tackling dummy later. A snowball fight was happening without fail and we inevitably figured out a way to turn sled riding into a demolition derby before the end of the night. And if anyone’s ever on Jeopardy, I’ve got the winning answer for you….Six. You can stack six prepubescent kids on one inner-tube and still get it sliding down a snow covered hill before it bursts.
Looking back on it now, it was a hell of a scene. Most of our families didn’t have a lot of money, so we were dressed in whatever we could find to keep us out in the snow for the longest possible amount of time. In most cases it was our father’s old gear from whatever plant or mine he worked in. The images in my head right now are actually pretty comical. Layers of cloth or leather gloves, old Wonderbread bags between our socks and our shoes to keep our feet dry, coats that hung to our ankles in some cases, topped off by hats that were at least four sizes too big for us….on the really cold nights you’d be wearing so many layers of clothing that you could barely bend at the joints. How none of us ended up working in research and development for North Face or Columbia is really a mystery to me. I wish I had pictures of those sled riding days. We had to look like a really bad mash-up between a Norman Rockwell painting, an orphanage scene from Oliver and an episode of The Little Rascals.
Those fall and winter images really are some of the best memories of my childhood. It’s more than just the sled riding, muddy football games and playing in the leaves though. I learned in my teens that winter is where you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. All the days spent cutting, splitting, hauling and stacking firewood paid off in the winter. All the time in the garden through the summer and especially the hours upon hours Mom put into canning those vegetables and preserving fruits and jellies paid off in the winter. There’s not a jelly on this planet that tastes better than a blackberry jam produced because you sweat your ass off in a thicket in July and your Mom spent the time to preserve them for your breakfast toast later that year. An immeasurable degree of satisfaction comes from knowing that you did what it takes to not only survive, but thrive through an Appalachian winter.
Ya know, I’ve got nothing against Spring and Summer. Hell, I’m to a point where every day’s a holiday to me, regardless where it falls on the calendar. My bones and joints ache more in the fall and winter…I wish I could have the winter weather with a few more hours of daylight each day to enjoy it…but I don’t think you’ll ever hear me cuss the cold temperatures, short days and long nights. This time of year holds quite a few of my fondest memories and is the key to my annual sense of accomplishment.
Something I learned from living in a tropical climate…you don’t have to suffer through Winter, but you also don’t get to enjoy the sight and scent of everything coming alive again in the Spring. You can’t have one without the other…at least I haven’t found anywhere on this planet where you get to enjoy Spring with out enduring Winter. In these hills we get to witness the rebirth of everything in nature EVERY year here…and whether you realize it or not, a great portion of this planet NEVER witnesses that once in their entire lifetime.
So…give Winter a chance, my friends. See the good in it. Change your perspective and it’ll change your whole world.