Swish of Skis

Days have gradually cooled and shortened. Overcast with flurries seems the norm now. We get an occasional visit by the sun. But at night, we don’t fret because it is always seventy degrees. I can almost hear the dishes rattling on Southern California dinner tables—shaken by shivering. Anyone so afflicted has my sympathy.

I had a notion while growing up in Pasadena that people from cold climates came to my hometown to retire and get old. They seemed to rank it right up there with Miami and Phoenix. If they did not move permanently, then they came for the winter. I imagined places like Chicago and Staten Island filled with young winterphobes, surviving and saving for the day they can come to us. We listened to stories of ice and snow told at church socials by old folks who had left all that.

But I was wrong. Or maybe I judged a population from an atypical sample—judged Northerners from a few who believed that way. Here in the “Icebox of the Nation” I meet, not so many young and wistful, as a preponderance or wrinkled skin and gray hair. I meet old-timers who will go to Phoenix for Christmas to visit their kids.

Christina, who sits on the stool next to me and Sandy’s, has her driveway shoveled and her ticket bought. Her gray hair is beauty-shop fresh and her nails are all the same, “working length,” finished in modest pink. I don’t know how old she is, but her husband died ten years ago of “old age,” and she still wears his ring. She says to me, “You have spunk.”

You remember Sandy, the namesake and owner—long single braid, thin and strong, fast as a hockey player. It turns out she’s Katrina’s mother. I am slower to learn about them than they are to discover me. Isn’t that a fine fate for one who came here to observe, blend in, and write an outsider’s view of Frostbite Falls? And Sandy is not going anywhere.

Larry, on his stool at the end, the stool everybody leaves for him, says that my gloves are good. I blush, knowing that he’s eighty-something and has lived here all his life. He says they’ll do me down to minus twenty if I’m active.

And today I was active. So anxious was I to get on the skis, that I didn’t wait for enough snow to make skiing really effective. I set off on just a foot of snow, where boots would have worked fine. The Blue Ox Trail is just behind my room; I bundled up in zero degrees and started off. I still make mistakes in my bundling, learning, as the temperature drops, some nuance that does not work at zero, but worked fine at ten. Today, my glasses fogged-up right away. They always do that, but it goes away in a few minutes. Not today. The fog turned to ice and stayed there. I cleaned them and tried again, and finally did without them. Next time I’ll try setting them outside the door to cool first, and I’ll leave my face uncovered for a few minutes at the start. Yes, that should work.

Now I am back in my seventy-degree room, comfortable—a bit of wine, a bit of microwave soup.



soft snow
impressible
by feet of men
how deep the ruts
tradition
conformity