Warming up
It was warming up that late March morning in 1970. The water gushing down the stream behind our house was in full swing. Our basement sump pump was running constantly, trying to keep the water from going over the 6th step of the stairs and drowning our furnace. My father stood in the threshold of the basement peering into the dark waters below while I peaked in under his elbow.
“Holy smokes”, I said in a low voice. We could hear the water running in and pumping out. The smell of wet wood and red iron dirt mixed in from the darkness tickling my nose. “Yup it’s still rising” my father said. He took a step down the stairs and measured the water with a stick he had made just for that purpose. I turned and sat next to the air duct vent in the hallway letting the heat cook the back of my legs.
Outside the sun was shining brightly and the snow was melting so fast you could almost see it leave. I decided to give up watching my father and I put on my snowsuit to go outdoors. I wasn’t out very long when I decided it was too warm for a hat. My black full-body snowsuit was acting like an inferno. Laying my mittens on the crusty dirty-looking snow bank, I unzipped my snowsuit as far as it would go. I shimmied out of the arms and wrapped the sleeves around my waist in a knot.
Barehanded, I picked up a large handful of the melting snow. It was cold, but not so bad. It felt like a thousand pellets of ice, not like snow at all. Gradually, my hands started to turn a mean shade of pinky red and by the twentieth snowball I made, they were burning. At my feet there was an arsenal of good hard-packed ice balls. Now I needed a good target.
I pulled the small toboggan out of the garage and loaded up my ammunition. I dragged it down to the end of the driveway. I surveyed the landscape and did not see anything that would make a good target. As I was about to turn around, I saw the keel and rear of a john boat sticking up from the snow along the edge of the woods. It was a long way to throw, but that didn’t stop me from trying again and again to hit the transom. With one great bell-like chime a perfect ball, made from the last of March’s good snow, clattered along the hillside that surrounded my flooding Limekiln Lake home.
