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Snuggly Blankets and January Fun
Ah January! I remember being a kid on Sunset Trail waking up to an ice-covered world. Overnight the fluffy snow in our yard, and the park next to our house, became a great big skating rink. It never occurred to me an ice storm would be a nightmare for the adults in my life; mostly I cared that we’d have breakfast, laugh because the school bus couldn’t get through, then don our skates and spend the morning twirling around outside. Sometimes we’d skate on the empty street with the other Catholic kids in the neighbourhood. I say “Catholic kids” because we went to school in town and Catholic kids relied on a bus to get there. The public school was located in our neighbourhood and was almost always open. The kids who went to Melody Road School didn’t often get to join us on a “weather day”. To tell the truth, though, my mom was an optimist. If the CBC didn’t announce a “no bus day”, Mom usually bundled us up and sent us up to Main Street on the off-chance the bus would get through and whisk us away to a day of learning. But kids always knew. We’d wait at the bus stop until the guy at Mason’s Garage came out and told us it was past nine o’clock and “Go home and tell your mother she wants ya”.
Poor Mom. I’m sure she watched out the kitchen window as the lot of us trudged and slid across the icy park toward home. It never occurred to us what her day would be like with all of us at home, all day. Of course, we had no idea what she did all day when we were in class. The thing is, my parents encouraged us to spend a lot of time playing outside. I understand why, now. Beside being a healthy thing to do, outdoor play gave our parents a break from the hubbub of having all of us inside, all day. In my early career as an elementary school student, television wasn’t really an option as a form of entertainment. Like a lot of people in the early 1950s, having a television was a whole lot like having dessert. Television watching was a treat, it didn’t happen very often and there really wasn’t a lot of programming for kids. We spent hours outside on icy days, skating and sliding, shouting and shoving, building snow forts and throwing snowballs at each other. When we’d had enough, or when our knitted mittens and woollen leggings were soaked, we ditched the skates, the boots, the toboggan and the hockey sticks in the side porch, then hung the leggings, jackets, scarves and mittens in the basement and settled around the kitchen table for soup and our bagged lunch. The soup was such a treat on a school day. Tomato was the best, but it was all good and mostly homemade. We knew how many cans of Campbell’s Soup it would take to fill the bellies of seven kids. Homemade soup was the best and, like television, canned soup was a treat.
So, here I am. It’s the beginning of the second week of January. Today, Sunday, the roads are ice-covered and I’m reminiscing about icy January days in the 1950s. I don’t own a pair of skates, or a toboggan, and that’s probably a good thing considering how busy emergency rooms are these days. I no longer have to worry about my kids getting to school or if the school bus might not show up. Perhaps our adult children are currently concerned about how to handle the next few days until their children go back to “regular school”. I hope my children are looking at these icy, snowy, blowy, cold January days as an opportunity to turn their televisions off, put the electronics away, make a pot of soup, maybe a batch of biscuits and enjoy the simplicity of a few laughs around the table. Maybe they’ll consider a slide down the driveway, or head to a park with their littles to have some fun. I’m pretty sure our children are “okay”. LOML and I raised them to enjoy the grey chill of a January day. An adult friend told me he and his wife had recently gone “all pandemic adolescent”. They put aside their regular-working-fromhome business day and built a blanket fort in their living room. I’m only guessing, but I bet they spent a few giggly hours not thinking about the cold, sick outside world.
So, blanket forts! Honestly, I’m no slouch when it comes to building blanket forts—ask our kids and our grandkids. I learned from the best, my mother. Mom was the queen of a good blanket fort. These days, the problem for LOML and I is getting in and out of a blanket fort with any kind of dignity. Believe me, we’ve spent time in the dining room fort with our grandchildren and grand friends. And then? Well, and then I remember how little kids scramble around on their hands and knees to get in and out of GranGran’s blanket forts and I think LOML and I could probably manage to crawl to a sturdy chair to get up from the floor after a blanket fort adventure. Yeah, I think we could use a blanket fort. I think our “adult blanket fort” will have a bar—you know the kind I mean.
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