Winters of My Youth

I sing for the winters of my youth, which in my mind begin airborne: watching the clouds and sky reel with the last scrape of sled ringing like silence in my ears, floating. Sky, silence. Sky, silence. Until whump! snow compacts to form fit and shouts approach and that cloud drifts, changes, and I don’t move even just to prove I’m alive, paying with tingles, aches, icy trickles down my neck.

            These are the memories: hot chocolate with Mom and rosy cheeks in the little house in Spenard; Dad bursting home with snow on his beard, camping with Ian and Eric wrapped in tarps and watching stars – liners out of our of boots so they don’t freeze and can serve as sock puppets on Orion’s stage, a Snickers thawing on my belly.

            These were winters of April blizzards and porch-high powder, the Sunday-morning scrape of Dad’s shovel on the roof, cold air inside with the newest color Calvin and Hobbes, a quilt and a fight with my sister; days of trenches on the shed roof and blueprints for fort-linking tunnels, of no enemies and grand defenses, winters of snowburm mountains and Dee Dee Jonroe swishing ‘round the corner at Goose Lake, dogs yapping tongues flapping and spray smacking your face as you jumped and cheered.

            Our friend Gina made cranberry brandy and Mom and Dad took brisk skis with flasks and rosy cheeks, dragging us along through snow-draped birch, and I yelled bonzai on the downhill and tumbled into a knot of extended limbs.

            I wasn’t hurt because the snow in those days made you invincible, even, somehow, to cold. That we learned winter camping with ten boy scouts and three dads, wrapping tarps in an octagon to reflect the heat and stripping layers until we bared our tiny eleven-year-old chests and ate marshmallows, toasted by fire, bravado and parents who couldn’t admit they’d never camped at six below, either.

            This is about the cabin, the clatter of firewood thrown on the pile, heat sucking out the door, Dad brushing snow onto splinters and flakes of birch bark, sap smell and spruce smoke and the door groaning closed. Early morning at the cabin had dignity. Dad’s arms had thrown the logs up, his hands drawn the plans, and he could work without the stay-at-home coffee and want ads of a laid-off welder, had more to do than teach chess to a child to pass the time.

            But in the city, hockey was the purest – cold air burning down your lungs and down to a steaming T-shirt, one-on-one in the backyard with Dad, dinner cooking, rink lit by Christmas lights in Febuary and a shadow from the moon on the spruce trees.

            In the blue light of a Saturday afternoon our friends played, hypnotized by the rhythm of passes and dekes, ignoring the crystal-draped trees and hoar-frost on the chain-link fence that shuddered and shattered and rained broken ice if you shot it. It was shinny hockey, shinpads taped under jeans and chin yarn waving in the breeze that comes with pure and scraping speed – fakes and passes, rotating triangles and bursting til your lungs tore ‘cause even if it was just shinny there was no relent.           

            I recall the purity of those winter months and the year the snow kept falling, in April, May, and I was 8 and could make hobbit holes.

            Now, for whatever pundit-mangled reason, it is raining on Christmas. Yellow grass penetrates the snow. The cross-country races sliced over a film of muddy shavings collected from zambonis. I realize my children will never believe that every winter, it never thawed.

            So maybe Grandfather was as dashing in tails as Grandma claims, and maybe Dad really did free solo a chausy cliff in Mexico in the early days of rock climbing. If what I remember so clearly is so true and vanished, I don’t doubt Mom tried to canoe Cook Inlet, and Stuart Beard is that little dot on someone’s shoulders, bobbing along in an aerial photo of post-earthquake damage in ’64. Maybe there were sawdust bars and rowdy individualists, crazy sons of gold and oil telling themselves they wanted fortune and not freedom, that they were running to and not away. Maybe there were gods and demons, spirits and ravens, salmon thick as traffic and copper mountains green as grass.
            This is for winters that I know were real, and the miracles that happen, true in every generation, while we build magic for the next.