Minnesota Snow Child

I am still a Minnesota snow child. The summer fishing and endless bike rides were fine as far as they went. But to me an overnight snowfall was an incomparable gift that turned my existence into a bracing delight.

If you were dreamy enough, as I was back in those pre-Doppler Radar days, you could sense the arrival of the first big overnight snowfall. The sky is battleship gray and the bare elm branches clatter in the wind, which carries the scent of an unflavored sno-cone. On the evening news good old Bud Kraehling is hedging his bets -- not saying it will snow and not saying it won't. But the glint in his eye lets me know he is wishing for it as much as I am.

I can usually see the Weatherball perched atop the Northwestern National Bank building in downtown Minneapolis from my bedroom window. But this night the frost is too thick on the glass pane -- which I take to be another good sign of coming snowfall. Our curmudgeonly oil-burning furnace in the basement clanks like boxcars being connected as it strives to keep our thinly insulated house warm. We have storm windows, but otherwise the only insulation is ancient newspapers, crisped brown, laid along the attic rafters helter-skelter.  

Falling asleep as a kid on a winter night is like being administered a powerful anesthetic in the hospital right before surgery; one second I'm wide awake and full of thoughts, and then it's eight hours later with seemingly no measurable interval between the two points of time. For a delicious moment I look around the room, which is bathed in a bright milky light -- the shine of sunlight reflecting off snow.

A bowl of Malt-o-Meal awaits me in the kitchen, where I sit staring out the windows at the frigid manna. Where once there was nothing but a bitter brown frozen lawn there now sits a quilt of snow. I can't wait to get out into it. My mother scolds unheeded as I play with my cereal, too excited to eat.

Then comes the prodigious ceremony of getting dressed to go out. This takes time and patience. No slick polyester materials back then to shield me from the chill. First come the zippered black rubber galoshes over the shoes. The zipper, of course, is reluctant to cooperate and needs to be rubbed and lubricated with a bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap. Then a long woolen scarf is wrapped round and round my scrawny neck until it looks and feels like a yoke. My padded wool coat weighs a good ten pounds dry -- once it is wet with melted snow it will double in weight. A wool cap is forced down over my head like a bottle cap, and then the thick woolen mittens are attached to my hands. I've already broken into a sweat as I step out the back kitchen door into the purity of untrodden and untroubled snow.

If it's a school day I trudge through the snow one block to Tuttle Grade School -- imagining all the while I am fighting through a trackless Siberian waste. Is that a polar bear up ahead ready to pounce? No, just old Mrs. Henderson's wheelbarrow carelessly left out in the yard overnight. A file of penguins in the distance resolves itself into other little drudges like myself, waddling along to school.

But, glory be, if it is NOT a school day, I head back to the garage to disinter the snow shovel -- in my case a cast iron coal shovel that weighs almost as much as me. I dig and thrust with this behemoth until I have cleared a path from the garage to the back door, then rest a moment to watch the lines of snow fall silently to the ground as the wind stirs the elm branches. Then I continue my labor into the front until the sidewalks are clear.

Now, I have pondered many years as to why I enjoyed this chore so much. As a general rule, I was loath to lift a finger around the house and had to be threatened and bribed immoderately to do anything. But to me shoveling was a pleasure. Perhaps it was the pristine silence all around me or the deep heavy clang of the shovel as it scrapped the cement. Something tactile it was, that gave me a keen sense of delight. My mother was equally puzzled as to why this one particular chore held me in such a thrall, but she was not going to rock the boat by asking me why I liked doing it. If it ain't broke . . .

Until, of course, I grew up and acquired a bad back. Then shoveling became hateful torture.

School day or not, the most pressing item on the agenda is bushwhacking my best friend Wayne with a snowball. He lives across the street from me, and it is understood by both of us that no warning is given prior to launch. Whoever scores a direct hit first wins. A year older than me, Wayne is wiser than I am in all boyhood things -- but the first strike triumph is always mine. Probably because he is a bit more of a gentleman than I am. When it comes to snowballs, I am an out-and-out cad. I know his habits and schedule well, and I lie in wait behind tree trunk or mailbox to ambush him. The rules then call for a general free-for-all, with targets including other unwary passersby and cars going down the street. Usually as the battle reaches a white hot pitch one of the cars we pelt brakes abruptly and the driver piles out to revenge himself on the little weasels who have scared the bejabbers out of him. That is our cue to melt away like the wily Inuit into the blinding whiteness.

A Minnesota snowfall is an abiding thing; it won't run out on you. So there is plenty of time for snowmen and snow forts and more snowball fights.

Naturally sledding is on the agenda, but it is a challenge in that the nearest park, Van Cleve, is as flat as a pool table. So we take our sleds over to Grandma's Hill -- a very slight hump in Southeast Minneapolis that answers for immediate needs. It's actually a street that crosses a railroad track. My grandmother Daisy lives on that street; hence the moniker 'Grandma's Hill'. The descent is not very spectacular, but sliding across the railroad tracks adds that touch of forbidden danger that a boy craves like candy.

My soggy woolens are freezing up, giving me a stiff Frankenstein's monster walk, so it must be time to head for home. One last snowball is exchanged for friendship's sake and then I'm in the back hall, ruddy-cheeked and on the verge of chilblains. Emerged from my soggy cocoon, I sit down to a big plate of Schweigert wieners -- my mother's traditional meal after the first big snowfall. She serves them with plain macaroni and canned corn on the side. It is food I still eat, at least in my mind, whenever the slings and arrows and bad backs of life become too acute.