Childhood Vignettes: Winter

It seems as though my definition of WINTER hasn't matched the reality of our recent winters. With the exception of a few scattered blizzards in the last decade it seems winter has taken a long hiatus. Now, I am a fair-weathered creature. Autumn and spring are my favorite times of the year here in the northeast. But there are aspect of winter that I really enjoy. A good blizzard, shoveling out of at least a few inches of snow, coming inside to a cup of cocoa with marshmallows, curling up with a blanket and a book...and the smell of a woodstove when the air has a bite to it.

This post is a glance at one of my childhood memories to that end. For where you have a woodstove, you have the continual need for wood--and in my household that meant... filling the woodbox.

Now that task usually fell to me and my brother Joe, who is about 3 years younger than I. We groaned, we moaned, we pleaded..."but it's cold outside"! When it was bitterly cold my dad did it, but usually it was just our own laziness that turned it into a tasking chore. Really, when I look back on it now, it was quite a simple process. Load up the sled, pull it about 50 feet to the house, and drop it into the box. The sled was fashioned from a retired metal windowwell with two holes and a rope to pull. The woodbox was a recessed 4 x 4 x 5' cement-blocked hole with a door that opened into our basement furnace room wall. This meant that if the box was empty, you had to strategically throw the cut wood till it was high enough to stand on--important if you wanted to get out! And of course this process was that much easier with two set of hands.

I know it probably took Joe and I, and then years later Joe & Ryan, twice as long as necessary to do the job--there were the snowball battles and snow angel diversions, pretend horse-drawn sleigh dramas, and various other ways we sought to make it fun. But it's one of those nostalgic flashes from the past that comes when winter weather hits. All it takes is a thick blanket of fresh snow, a chill in the air, and the smell of woodsmoke.