Do You Remember When Snow was Fun?

The snow is leaving. Sunshine. Yea!

Do you remember when snow was fun? When you were a child, you couldn’t wait to play in the snow. To throw snow balls, to build a snow fort, to slide down the steep hill.

My first memory of snow, I was two or three years old. Mom made snow ice cream by taking clean snow, adding vanilla, sugar and little cream. That made a slushy ice cream and we thought it was delicious. We didn’t have an ice cream freezer. Sometimes, Mom put cream, sugar and vanilla in a syrup bucket and put it out in the snow. If she went out and turned the bucket every so often, we had ice cream for supper.

When I was child, my brother and I didn’t have a sled. Dad made us a couple of small sleds out of wood. The runners were wooden also and didn’t do well on snow. But they slid fine on ice. It didn’t take Brother Jerry and me long to figure out how to make ice out of the snow.

It was fun to slog the mile to school in the snow. We knew only a few students would show up to our one room school. It would be a fun day. There was a long hill to travel down to the schoolhouse. Again, my brother co-conspirator and I decided we could sit on our lunch buckets and slide down the hill. Mom was not too proud of us as our lunch buckets were new and fancy. They were just like Dad’s that had a raised top with a thermos in it.

As a teen, my neighbor was with the highway department. He and his wife owned a grocery store as well. She did not like to stay alone when he had to work nights on the snowy or icy roads. He would pick up his niece (my best friend,) then bring the highway snow truck to my house, blade off our drive and pick me up. The two of us were to stay at the store with his wife. Fine guards we were. We spent a good part of the night, slipping and sliding in the snow, drinking hot chocolate and generally enjoying ourselves.

Then there is the down side of snow. We heated with wood at our house in the Ozarks. Dad’s rule was, “You can’t listen to the radio until you do your chores.” Chores like bring in enough wood for the night and the next day, gather the eggs, feed and water the animals. It was not fun to do chores in the snow when it was cold. That long road to school got cold too, however much fun we had, we arrived at school with cold noses, wet gloves and frosty toes.

Of course, you remember getting your child bundled up for snow. They would stay five minutes and want to go inside. There they stayed five minutes, then demanded to be bundled up again.

My husband and I had a wreck in snow one time. We slipped off the road and landed upside down. The snow cushioned our fall, but it took us a few minutes to get out of the car and a long time (it seemed) for someone to come along and give us ride back to Mountain Grove.

We owned a heating oil – wholesale gasoline business in Mountain Grove. Many of the older homes heated with heating oil. There are two kinds of heating oil. One kind will freeze up in very cold weather if it isn’t mixed with the lighter oil. Many times, we got a call in the middle of a cold, snowy night that their furnace wasn’t working. The oil had congealed in the line. Clif would bundle up, take a flashlight and go to the home to thaw the oil line. When the kids were old enough to stay alone, I would go with him to hold the light. Cold! Oh my. Clif had on enough clothes to keep him warm. Not me. I didn’t own coverall and a flop eared cap. So mainly, I shivered and my teeth chattered until we had the client’s fire going and they were toasty warm.

Oh, those were the days.