Some Things Never Change

The picture might as well have been taken yesterday - but fact of the matter is, it was taken a year ago on December 10, 2008. I drove to the store yesterday in a virtual whiteout and it might as well have been a repeat of last year. What's more, our temperature was 9 above zero and it isn't even winter yet


I've never been overly troubled by winter weather although my beloved hates it. From the time I was a child I loved to play in the snow and now at 82 I guess I still do.




That reminds me of an episode in the late sixties when we lived in St. Charles, Missouri. We had a major snowstorm and the children wanted to go sleigh-riding. Only problem was, we didn't have a sled and we were low on money. So I decided to build one.

I went down in the basement of the house to look for materials. There was some hardware, some two-by-fours, a four foot slab of wood, some tin, and some clothes-line. In an hour or two I had a sled of sorts with tin on two-by-four runners and it looked like it would work.

The sled was loaded in the car and off we went to the local sledding hill. When we took it out of the car we got a lot of weird looks from other people, but hey, it was a sled - a bit like an old bob sled we had back in the early 1940's. But we had not figured on deep snow and a good-size hill and the sled was heavy. I mean REALLY heavy. But we eventually got it to the top of the bill and got four of us on it.

Would you believe, it worked like a charm. Between the weight of the sled and the riders it went through the snow like a flash.

I'm not sure how many more times we used it but it was a conversation piece every time we went out. I don't think we took it with us when we moved - maybe we got enough money to buy a real sled (or sleds) but for that season it gave us fun making it and we got a lot of use out of it. Most of all, it was a family project - several of us pitched in to make it and it took every rider pulling it to get it to the top of the hill.

Come to think of it. there probably might have been no better time to have come up with a rope tow like they had (and maybe still have) at ski slopes. Reminds me that if you are saturated in, lemons it's time to make lemonade. Except when you are saturated in snow and don't have a sled. And there's scrap wood in the basement. The important thing was that we had a lot of fun in the process. Family fun. And a lot better than today staying in the house playing computer games but I guess kids today might not agree. Oh, well.......