TERRY MOSHER
I don’t hate, but snow comes pretty close. Hate is the absent of love and I love the picture snow builds as it falls on our wonderful winter wonderland here in the Pacific Northwest…
But, and this is a big but, please snow someplace else. Our grown daughter lives on Mason Lake and she loves snow. So, I tell her, keep it there.
My distaste for snow began in New York State where I spent my first 14 years. Talk about snow. We would have snowball in late October and that’s the last we would see of green grass. That snow would stick and stay around until April showers melted it.
I don’t ever remember school closing because of snow. Back there, governments have plenty of snow removal equipment and they sprinkle sand spiced with salt on the roads (which leads to rusting out of cars).
What I remember is the snow would become crusted and you could walk on it (if you were a lightweight kid like I was) without falling through – usually. There was the time when I was about five that I went with my older brothers and some of their friends a mile away to toboggan down a dugout road. We could toboggan down the road and slide into the real road at the bottom.
At some point I got tired of it and became very cold. You need to know that back then – this was in the middle to late 1940s – winter weather was extremely cold. We would have weeks of below zero weather.
Anyway, I took the shortcut home from tobogganing, cutting across backyards, the railroad tracks and then into some cow pasture. The snow was maybe a couple feet deep, but as I said above you could walk on the top of the snow because it was crusted from the cold.
But, every now and then I would break through the crust and my rubber boats would be buried in the deep snow. I would then have to struggle to break free to resume my walk home.
I’m not sure now how long it took me to make that long walk, but probably at least 45 minutes. In today’s world if somebody let a young child do what I did Child Protective Services would be called. Back then, the only protection I had was my determination to make it home no matter what.
When I finally got home, my mom greeted me at the backdoor of our house and clearly was upset, although it wasn’t a big deal to me. That’s what you did back in those times in those wintery conditions – you prevailed by whatever means you had at your disposal. I remember my mother often buttoning me up securely with a heavy coat, scarf, mittens, and boots and sending me out in the cold. I also remember coming back in the house fairly quickly and sitting on our hot-water radiator to warm up my frozen body.
My mother on this day put me to bed and packed my chest with mustard plaster. That’s awful stuff, by the way, but until I just looked it up I have never known what it was. Here is what I found about it: “… a poultice of mustard seed powder pread inside a protective dressing and applied to the body to stimulate healing. It can be used to warm muscle tissues and for chronic aches and pains.”
I do also remember that when my brothers got home, my mother dressed them down for allowing me to walk home. They were supposed to take care of me, she said. That is, even to this day, some comfort to me to know that somebody cared enough about me to not only take care of me, but to stand up for me against others. That is love in the purest sense, and my mother had an excess of that, especially for her sons.
I do think, however, that my mother was little naïve. When my oldest brother came home from Air Force boot camp with his best buddy, I remember her straightening out his collar on his uniform (military members in those days had to wear their uniforms in public because, I’m guessing, there was still heightened patriotism left over from World War II) before he and his friend went out that night).
As she smoothed out his collar, my mother said, “Now Ray, don’t drink anything tonight.” My brother quickly responded, “I won’t. I will just drink gin.”
I was standing behind my mother watching all of this and I’m probably 11 or12 and I immediately knew what he was saying and started to laugh before I realized I might be giving away his secret and stopped.
If my mother knew that gin was an alcoholic beverage, she didn’t show it. My mom didn’t drink, and she didn’t like my dad to drink either, although she allowed him a couple beers if he drank them at home. But two beers might be it. No more.
It’s funny what we remember. This one isn’t funny. It’s nagged at me for over 60 years. I didn’t realize my mother was sick and one late spring day she asked me to go out and weed around the flowers.
I made up some excuse and told her that I would do it later. Well, I forgot about it and went out and played with my neighborhood buddies. When I came home hours later there she was weeding he flowers alongside the house. She never said anything and I didn’t either, but I felt shame that I had not done the work.
What I remember is her coming in the house and lying on our living room couch and coughing up phlegm. Less than a week later she was dead. She had a defective heart valve that if it was today would be an out-patient fix, but back then there were no answers to that condition.
To this day, not weeding the flowers haunts me. I know I’m not supposed to feel guilty. I’m old enough to know she likely would have died no matter what I did or didn’t do. But that moment, that day, sticks with me, and frankly I’m glad it does because it keeps a picture of the mother I dearly love deep in my heart where it belongs.
So how did I go from snow that I almost hate to a mother I deeply love? Don’t know, but there it is. I hope that you still have power and are surviving nicely this downpour of white stuff. Just don’t expect me to love it. It looks nice, but nice can be deceiving when you are five years old and a mile away from home.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.