First Snow of the Season

So many people look forward to the first snow of the season, and many others afterwards, but I do not. I never can remember a time when I looked forward to snow and winter. It seems I have always been the person who looked forward to, enjoyed so very much and always felt cheated of spring and summer. Winter is sooo long and spring and summer so short, and yet, as soon as my kind of weather comes, I still have to dress for winter because everywhere I go – there is air conditioning up so high, making it cold. For me, I start dreading fall and winter from the Fourth of July on – knowing it seems like only a couple of weeks between the Fourth and Labor Day and Labor Day meant cold weather was coming. Oh I know about Indian Summer  - but it never lasted long enough for me to really forget what was coming. Bulky sweaters and coats, bundling up and feeling that wind and cold stinging my face is what I had to look forward to and I don’t relish that.

As a child, when the other kids couldn’t wait to get out in the snow, I would think – why??? Why would anyone want to have that icy water down your neck, and what was so much fun about sliding down the hill, you only had to trudge back up, pulling that heavy sled, to do it over again.

And of course, with snow, came the bitter cold, which seemed to, and still does, last forever.  As a child I would have to wear long, brown cotton stockings to school, as did most of the girls, but it always seemed mine were the ugliest. So many times when I would get to school, I would pull out the pair of anklets I had hidden in my locker and change them as soon as I got there.

Winter meant chapped hands, soothed each night with my grandmother’s homemade hand lotion. I can still smell it today, made of  glycerine and rose  or lavender oil she would get at the drug store. After oiling my hands good, my mother would slip on a pair of her old cotton gloves and I would fall asleep with that lovely fragrance. Amazingly the next morning my hands would be almost smooth again, only to have to go back out into the cold and start the routine again.

After I became a mother, it seemed I spent a lot of hours bundling my children into their snowsuits, scarves, mittens etc. to go out to play, which only lasted  a very short time as one or more of them would rush back into the house, to ‘tinkle’, the cold air having set that off! So it meant hurriedly unbundling them (hopefully in time), off to the bathroom, only to have them want to go outside again.

To top it off, I married a man who enjoyed fall and winter as much as the children did. Even after we moved to California, as soon as we would walk out of the back door of our home and see snow on Mt. Baldy, I knew it meant the trek to the mountains, which he so enjoyed. While he would romp in the snow, I would stand by the car shivering or simply remain it the car and work on whatever project I was doing at the time. We had to do this at least once or twice a winter! Somehow today, I would give anything to be able to make that trip again, just to be with him and would try very hard to enjoy it.

Now don’t get me wrong – there were and are some things I do enjoy about winter – the holidays were always special, less now that the family is scattered; hot chocolate and popcorn after the kids came home from skating at the school. Our local grade school tennis courts would be flooded and lighted to make a skating rink for the locals, and being only six houses from the school, my family spent many hours down there. I did try to learn ice skating, but again, it was a lost cause. My husband loved to ski, so one year when the local newspaper offered the annual learn to ski deal at a local area in Michigan, ‘we’ decided that I would learn to ski and maybe I would enjoy winter more. Well, the night we were to go, it snowed so hard, and even though we made the attempt to get there, couldn’t get up the hill to the lodge because of the ice, so we turned around and went home – guess who really enjoyed that lesson – the only one I ever tried to do again!

I enjoyed decorating our house for the holidays, but picking out the tree was another chore for me as it meant trudging through the lot for just the right one. Oh I was so happy when they started to make artificial trees that looked like real ones – still enjoying opening that box!!

Well, okay so I am not a winter person, but I do have one thing to really look forward to, and each day I get closer to it, and that is when I get to heaven where I know I will have my kind of weather for eternity. I used to say I would have to die and go to hell to get warm, but in my walk with the Lord, I know that even that is not true !