There's snow place like home
You can sing along to the tune of that popular Christmas song as I say to my chagrin that “It’s beginning to look a lot like ... the winter of 1996-97.”
I say this, of course, after another morning of snow shoveling at our rural Whitefish home. Seems I’ve been shoveling a lot already this winter, and I don’t like what I’m hearing about forecasts for what meteorologists say could be one of the strongest La Nina weather events on record.
This is bad news because the last time La Nina really had its way with Montana was that infamous winter of ’96-97, and none of us wants to relive that one.
On New Year’s Eve that year I frantically shoveled about three feet of new snow off the roof as my daughters’ friends began arriving for a slumber party. I barely got any sleep that night because I worried the roof was going to collapse as it kept snowing (at the time we lived in a real snow belt 13 miles northwest of Whitefish). Of course the roof held and all my worrying was for naught.
I have a real love-hate relationship with snow. Growing up in Northern Minnesota, snow was the bane of our existence, but it was also the source of a lot of winter recreation and fond memories of tobogganing at break-neck speed down the steep hill behind our house. Sledding and building snow forts later gave way to skiing and snowmobiling.
Snowstorms were so prevalent back home that the schools required farm children (about 90 percent of the school’s enrollment) to have a town family listed with the school where we could stay if the buses couldn’t make it through the snow.
When I was in second grade, a blizzard came out of nowhere and we had to stay in town. It was probably the first time I’d ever spent the night away from home, so I remember it vividly.
By the time the bus plowed through the deep drifts to drop us off at our “town house,” the snow was thigh high and the wind was fierce. I was wearing a brown cotton dress and tights — no snow pants or Sorel boots or SmartWool socks in those days.
Mrs. Solum, the mother who lived in the modest bungalow with her husband and four daughters, shepherded all of us into the living room and there must have been two dozen children. I didn’t know where we were all going to sleep or how she’d feed the mass of youngsters she’d abruptly acquired.
When she laid out a feast of hot dish (casserole to you non-Midwesterners), Jell-O salad and lots of white bread and butter, I likened it to the biblical feeding of the five thousand with just a bit of bread and fish.
What I’d learn later is that any self-respecting Minnesota housewife has enough elbow macaroni, tomato soup and assorted flavors of Jell-O in the cupboard to feed a small army, should the need arise.
We played hide-and-seek with reckless abandon and settled into board games until we were layered like sardines on the floor for the night.
The next day we went back to school, in our same clothes, because the roads still weren’t plowed in the country.
It has to be said that I just don’t get the same kick out of snow that I used to. Sure, it’s great to have enough of it to cross-country ski and snowshoe, but more and more I can relate to the “snowbirds” who fly south for the winter.
So the grumbling continues. Colleagues in the newsroom say they’re going to choke the next person who points out: “But we need the moisture.”
Moisture is the last thing on your mind when you can’t get out of your driveway without a fair amount of back-breaking labor.
And yet somehow, next year when the first snowfall of the season greets me with those fluffy, seductive flakes, I’ll fall in love all over again.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com