Opinions

I’ve never been very good at making, or keeping, New Year’s resolutions, mostly because I already have more things I OUGHT to do than things I WANT to do. Thus, I am taking a different approach this year and getting rid of some of them, rather than adding to the burden.

My parents were geniuses at making childhood magic for my sisters and me. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have several children so I could have the fun of creating the wonderland for them, watching them learn and grow and thrive in a secure and rich environment similar to what I had known. The world changed a lot in the quarter century between my childhood and theirs, however. Iowa City was a very different place in 1959 than Knoxville had been in 1936 when my earliest memories begin.

When I was still young enough to have that unshakable faith in the Christmas myth, we lived in a house that had a coal furnace in the basement and the heat it produced depended on gravity to get it where it was wanted. Needless to say, without an automatic fan or duct work to the upstairs bedrooms, gravity didn’t always produce the desired effect. The ground floor rooms had big square metal grates near the walls closest to the furnace below. These were fed the warm air through large ducts that came as straight as possible from the furnace itself.

The earliest winters I remember were spent in the neighborhood where we lived until I was in third or fourth grade. Our streets weren’t plowed after a snowfall, instead, most people had chains on their tires to aid traction on the streets which soon became slick with packed snow. Many of the older boys indulged themselves with a free ride, belly-flopping with their sleds onto the road behind a passing car and grabbing the rear bumper to be towed at a fast clip for blocks at a time.

There’s one thing about winters from the past that I realize I’ve missed for a good many years. That’s those ferny, ostrich-feather plumes of frost on the windows. It seems that, when I was a child, the kitchen windows in our house were etched with frost nearly all winter. Frost on the inside of the windows where we could scratch it off with our fingernails to peer out, watching for Dad to get home for supper.