I woke up this morning and looked at the thermometer. Good grief it?Äôs 15 below zero, again. This has got to be the winter from hell! I?Äôm so sick of winter I wanna scream!
I busied myself with various tasks: carrying in wood, carrying out ashes, shoveling snow and cussing. As the day went on, the sun was shining and the temperature started to rise. I did some more work. Then around 3:30 p.m. I looked at the thermometer again and it was 10 degrees above zero. Wow! I gazed out the window and then my legs took off and the next thing you know, I was hiking in the woods. I walked on the deer trails where the snow was packed and would carry my weight without sinking in. My, oh my, I hadn?Äôt done that since last November just before the first foot of snow fell.
Being impulsive has its down side. I dressed in my snowsuit, snow boots, a good pair of mittens and tucked my cell phone in my pocket. What I didn?Äôt do was change my socks. I had on an old pair that kept sliding down in my boots. Every 10 minutes I had to sit in a snow bank, unzip my side zipper and fish those darn socks back out of the boot and pull them up as high as I could. After the third time, I had some new words for those socks. I made up my mind to toss them in the fireplace when I got home and enjoy watching them burn. I?Äôm pretty frugal but this is going too far.
The sun produced a glorious scene. The snow lay upon the fields and in woods like a thick white blanket sprinkled with diamonds. This is God?Äôs work for sure. It almost made me forget that this is the same stuff I?Äôve been shoveling for the last five months.
As I walked back to my house, I realized I had been hiking for an hour and felt great. I?Äôll be 71 on my next birthday and wonder how long I?Äôll be able to hike cross country in the wintertime. But today, well this is a good day.
The hike made me extra hungry, so I thawed out some Thanksgiving turkey and some squash I grew in my garden last summer and topped it off with some homemade bread. I sat in front of my warm toasty fireplace and had a feast. Oh, those socks, I looked at them again and decided they had a few more miles in them and threw them in the laundry basket.
Watkins, Minn.
On the Banks of the Crow River