I don’t miss much from my childhood
on the farm, but I miss being snowed in.
Being snowed in is not waking in the morning to see that you’ll have to
spend a half hour shoveling to your car before the snowplows come and you get
towed. If you’re really snowed in, the
snowplows are snowed in. And being
snowed in at a your lakeside cabin where you’ll have to dust off your
snowmobile before going out on the frozen lake simply does not count because
you went to your cabin in the first place to escape normalcy. Being truly snowed in means being greeted by
an uninvited ravenous guest who swallows your whole day. If you are truly snowed in, life as you know
it comes to a complete standstill. It
means delicious imprisonment. It means
being wrapped in a straight jacket of silence.
My
sweet memories of being snowed in look like this. It started a few days before the actual event
with the dire forecast that a humongous blizzard was lumbering down from
Canada. The forecast did not produce dread. Quite the opposite, it fueled
excitement. This could be the big one!
Bigger than ’36! Better get your
kerosene lamps and candles ready!
The grocery stores
would be packed with people buying flour and sugar. The hardware store would be packed with
people buying batteries and shovels. The
variety store would be packed with people buying Monopoly games and jigsaw
puzzles. Getting ready for the big one
generated as much anticipatory excitement as getting ready for Christmas. Except this preparation was not in
anticipation of a congregation of relatives.
It was preparation for a celebration of solitude.
The morning after
the big one looked like this. A
wonderland of whiteness. Snowbanks as
high as telephone wires, the only thing moving the blue, wavering smoke from
distant farmhouse chimneys. Even though
one family could not drive out to see another family, it was still a grand
communal feeling. We were all in this
together, every family in its own survival cubicle. We never felt more connected, and it would
not be fair to say that misery loves company.
We were not miserable. We were
happy to have been chosen by the great mysteries of Midwest Weather. We were special. Though the power of all that snow trapped us
in one place, we still felt blessed. It
was an awe that stopped just short of worship.
Being totally
snowed in started with an awareness of what was outside and then burrowed its
way inside us. The body at first
signaled a need to move. Everybody,
including the adults, felt stir-crazy.
Maybe even irritable. “I’m
bored! But there was no easy resolution
to boredom or irritability. If parents
or siblings fought, they had nowhere to escape.
They had no choice but to deal with it.
Nobody dared to do anything so drastic that they’d have to go to the
doctor. You couldn’t go to the doctor
even if you needed to. If you had a
knockdown argument with a family member, you couldn’t resolve it by running off
to a friend’s house. You couldn’t even
go for a walk.
No matter how much
money was spent in anticipation of the snowed-in lock-down, it was still cheap
therapy. By mid morning, all able-bodied
persons would have put their hands to the shovel. On one big snowed-in day, my brother and I
had to jump from an upstairs window with snow shovels so we could dig a path to
the front door and let the other members of the family out. We had to dig our way to the barns to make
sure the animals were all right. By mid
afternoon, when boredom made its second threat, the board games and jig saw puzzles
that were once regarded as themselves mediums of boredom, now called out for
attention. So did those neglected
books. Puzzles got made, books got read,
towels got embroidered, socks got darned, pictures got framed, rooms got
cleaned, photo albums got sorted, old family stories got told, and—by the time
everyone was ready for bed—a good time had been had by all.
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