Memories 3: A Roanoke Winter

 

A ROANOKE WINTER

It was a cold winter that year in Roanoke. I remember that it actually snowed twice before Christmas - once in early December and again a few nights before Christmas. As I remember, Christmas was on a Tuesday, and it snowed about an inch on the previous Friday night, just enough to make the outdoors look Christmasy, and the Saturday grocery shopping a little slow. It must have been about '36 or '37, because I was about six or seven years old.

The big pre-Christmas event was the pageant that was presented at the church on Sunday night. It was always held in the large basement below the main sanctuary, where Sunday-School met on Sunday mornings. We walked the half-mile to the church, because the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the streets that had been wet and slushy during the day had now refrozen, making the streets too icy for automobiles.

We had to go a little early, because I was cast as a shepherd in the nativity scene to be presented by the Beginners department. The pageant was a bit anachronistic, with the biblical scenes being presented right beside a fully decorated Christmas tree. After the pageant, there was a pause, a slight commotion in the kitchen behind the stage, then a boisterous, "Ho! Ho! Ho!", and Santa appeared in the kitchen door, lugging what seemed to be a pillowcase filled with small packages. His task was to read the name of each child, who would then come forward to receive an orange and a small cardboard box filled with candy. As soon as I got back to my seat, I started to look in the box, but my mother frowned and signaled me to wait. The service concluded with everyone singing Christmas hymns, ending with Silent Night, which was sung with a kind of hushed reverence and followed by a few moments of silence, after which the minister pronounced the benediction, and we began our trek home.

Now at last I could check out my box of candy. I was disappointed at first because it all appeared to be hard candy, but finally I found one piece that was chocolate over a cream center, and popped it into my mouth. I kept digging and found another one, but that seemed to be all, so I concentrated on finding slick places on the street to slide on. It was windy and bitterly cold on top of Ninth Street hill, and I had to keep running and sliding to keep from shivering. Suddenly I thought about the candy again, and it occurred to me to open the other end of the box. This inspiration netted me a third chocolate drop, which I finished just as we turned onto the front walk at our house. The house felt cozily warm after the frigid trip, and I ran upstairs to put on my pajamas, while my father banked the furnace for the night.

The next day, Christmas Eve, all the schools had been closed for the Christmas holidays, but the children didn't do much playing. We were living in the future, our thoughts and our conversations centering on our hopes for the following morning. My mother did some preliminary cooking for Christmas before she started the evening meal, just as my father arrived from work, one hour early as a holiday concession from his employer. After supper my mother wrapped a few last minute presents while my father tuned the radio to the Santa Claus program for my sister Betty and me. On this program, Santa read letters sent in by local children, requesting lists of toys. Most of the letters would conclude with a promise to leave cookies and hot chocolate under the tree for him. After reading a dozen or so letters with this pledge, Santa would joke about dieting after Christmas. I'm not sure why I looked forward to this program so much, because I never sent in a letter, and I never recognized the names of any of the children that did send in letters.

After that program, every station had some kind of Christmas special, so we listened to Christmas music for a while, and then Betty and I were sent upstairs to bed, with the impossible admonition to go right off to sleep. I lay there in the dark, listening to the interesting sounds and unintelligible whispers emanating from the living room downstairs. Finally the light was turned off, and silence ensued. I tossed and turned and said prayers that dealt more with Christmas toys than anything of an eternal nature, then opened the blind at the window near my bed and held up the wind-up clock to see if I could tell the time by the light from the street lamp on Ninth Street. Less than an hour had passed. I repeated this exercise several times before I finally fell asleep.

I was awakened by the sound of the furnace grates being shaken as my father prepared to rekindle the fire. I called out, "Can we come down now?"

"Wait 'til the house warms up a little", my mother replied. But after a few minutes a colorful glow on the wall at the top of the steps indicated that the tree lights had been turned on. I slipped out of bed and over to the top of the stairs; but I still couldn't see the other end of the living room without going down three or four steps. I took one step down, and the stair emitted a loud crack. I had forgotten - that top step always cracked when anyone stepped on it. "I said, don't come down yet!" my mother called, serious this time. But I could tell she was still in the kitchen, so I sneaked down a couple of more steps and leaned over to get a peek. All of the furniture, the rugs, the walls - everything looked different, and in some way new, in that softly colored glow of the Christmas tree lights. Even the presents under the tree looked different, and now there were more of them.

And there, in front of all of them was a real sled! The previous winter my father had fashioned a homemade sled out of scrap lumber for me, but somehow the wooden runners didn't work just right, and I couldn't do much sledding with it. But this was the real thing, with steel snow runners! I sneaked back to bed and waited until my mother finally said that it was okay to come downstairs; but we were to march straight into the kitchen and have breakfast before opening presents. Of course, we had to go through the living room to get to the kitchen. I got a better look at the sled, and entered the kitchen talking about it. My mother reminded me that there wasn't enough snow on the ground to slide, and so I would have to wait for another snow; but that didn't dampen my enthusiasm, because I somehow felt that we were in for a long snowy winter.

While my mother finished preparing breakfast, my father celebrated Christmas in his own special way. Normally a serious, religious, hardworking man, he reverted back to his boyish nature on every Christmas and every Halloween. Our house was on Eighth Street, and the lot behind it, which was on Ninth Street, was vacant. At some time during the year, unknown to the rest of the family, my father acquired a stash of fireworks - not firecrackers, but FIREWORKS! It was barely six o'clock in the morning when he disappeared in the darkness behind the house. We watched from the kitchen window, until we saw a spurt of red flame, the whistle of a rocket, an explosion, and a shower of colored lights shooting out in all directions and then drifting downward. This display was followed by others, some on the ground, some airborne. After ten minutes or so of blasting away, he would sneak back to the house, still under the cover of darkness, so that the neighbors were never quite sure just who it was that saved them from committing the sacrilege of sleeping late on Christmas morning.

It was a tradition that we would have fried oysters for breakfast every Christmas morning. I hated them (how I have changed!). However, there were plenty of eggs and toast to fill me, but not so much that I didn't have room for some candy from my stocking. Besides the sled, which was to be shared with Betty, Santa had left me a couple of books of fairy tales, a box of Lincoln Logs, and a cap pistol. Betty got some games, the only one of which I can remember was Finance, a slight variation on the Monopoly theme.

I played with the Lincoln Logs for a while, and had just started reading one of the books when some of the neighborhood children came by, and we played Finance. Billy was there, and when Foo came up the street with his new cap gun, the three of us went outside to play cops-and robbers. What I wanted to do most of all was play with my sled, but that would have to wait.

I didn't have to wait long. It was not much more than a week later that a cold front moved through, bringing icy temperatures and plenty of snow. It started as a powdery, "dry" snow about midday, the kind with small, perfectly formed, hexagonal crystals. We would catch one on the back of a mitten, and then hold it out for the others to see, if it happened to be a particularly interesting or beautiful shape. The snow gradually changed over to the larger, "wetter", flakes and began to accumulate rapidly. By 3:30, when the day shift was ready to leave the silk mill, the streets were covered with a couple of inches of snow. That was not a cause for concern to my father, who walked to work; but for the men who had to drive to work, it presented a serious problem. The silk mill was located in the Roanoke River bottom at the foot of Ninth Street hill, and the cars had to ascend four blocks of slippery road to get to the top of the hill.

My father came in about four o'clock, tired, after the half-mile walk home from a day of physical labor. Then he laid his metal lunch bucket down, pulled on his boots, and went back out to Ninth Street to help push the cars that got stuck in the snow. That happened often, because occasionally the traffic would slow to a halt, and then it was nearly impossible to get started again on the slippery slope without a push. It was nearly dark when the last of the cars had made it to the top of the hill, and my father finally came back in. Somehow my mother had managed to keep the supper warm without overcooking everything.

My father always did that whenever a snowstorm caught the day shift at work; and he seemed to get a great deal of satisfaction from it, and from shoveling the snow from the sidewalks of the widows. Shoveling snow provided an outlet for his nearly endless dynamic energy, and it was part of the strong work ethic that had been etched into his character by his parents. He had a contempt for laziness, and would never do another man's work for him; but whenever he perceived a real need for help, he never hesitated, and he never waited to be asked.

After supper Betty and I went out to join the other children who were sledding. All of the streets in our neighborhood were sloped, because our part of the city was built on hills, mostly on Belmont Hill and Morningside Hill. We tried several streets, and decided that the one that came down Morningside Hill toward Ninth Street was the best, because it was steep enough to get plenty of speed coming down, but not so steep that it was hard to climb in the slippery snow. What made it even better, though, was that it dipped down below Ninth Street at its lowest point and then sloped back up toward Ninth Street, so that the sled would slow down when it hit that rise, and come to a gradual, painless stop.

It was already dark when we began sledding, but the streetlights on each corner provided enough light for our purposes. It was snowing so hard that the houses appeared hazy and, at a slight distance, vanished behind that soft furry screen. Standing directly under a streetlight, I looked upward and saw an enchanting sight. All was darkness above the cone of light cast by the light, but the snowflakes would magically appear as they entered it, and then waft slowly down through the windless air, to meet their fellow journeyers who had already completed their trip – while the supply was continuously being renewed from above. For a few seconds no one said anything, and there was complete silence - a strange silence, unlike that that I had experienced at night on visits to the Barger farm, because that was a motionless silence, while here the air was filled with motion as the thousands upon thousands of snowflakes moved inexorably earthward, but without a sound. This quiet motion engendered a sense of awe, but also a feeling of great peace. Then someone threw a snowball, and the spell was broken.

At that time a type of cap called an aviator helmet was popular with the younger boys. It had goggles that could be pulled down over the eyes and flaps that wrapped over the ears and snapped together under the chin. It was the ideal head gear for sledding, because the flaps kept our ears warm, and the goggles kept the snowflakes from flying into our eyes on a fast downhill trip. Sometimes we would pile two or three high on a sled; then someone would start rocking on the way down, and we would all wind up rolling in the snow while the sled continued downhill on its own.

The downhill rides were thrilling, but the steep, slippery uphill climbs eventually took their toll, and I had to call it quits. That climbing had kept me warm, too, but now as I trudged homeward, dragging the new sled behind me I began to feel the cold, and I arrived home chilled to the bone.

At that time our house did not yet have a basement furnace with a floor register. The back part of the first floor was heated by the kitchen stove, and the front and upstairs were heated by a coal stove in the living room. It sat about three feet out from the wall, and had a stovepipe that went horizontally into the wall and then up the flu to the chimney. Whenever I got cold, I would lie down on the floor between the stove and the wall. It wasn't just warm there - it was toasty warm.

This night I left my sled on the porch, pulled off my boots at the door, and went straight to my favorite spot. I doubt that I lay there three minutes before I was sound asleep. The next thing that I knew, I was lying in my own upstairs bed with my pajamas on. Once again I was awakened by the furnace grates being shaken. Soon breakfast would be ready, and I was hungry as a bear.

We were just starting to eat breakfast when we heard a loud crackling noise somewhere behind the house. Betty and I were frightened, but my mother just smiled and said, "Come see the streetcar". It was still dark outside as we stood at the kitchen window and looked out toward Ninth Street. The trolley was making its first run of the morning down Belmont Hill. Ice had formed on the cable that supplied the electric current for the car, and the pulley bar that rolled on the cable was arcing through the ice and burning it off as the car slowly made its way down the hill. This arcing created a huge blue spark, some three or four feet long, spurting up and back from the cable, causing the loud crackling noise that we had heard, and illuminating the whole area with an eerie blue light. I was just wearing my pajamas, so my father picked me up and carried me outside to get a better look at this weird phenomenon. And not just weird; it was, in a way, scary. In the semi-darkness, it looked like a cackling fire demon tormenting some kind of mechanical monster. We were more than a hundred feet from the cable, but the strong odor of ozone from the arc permeated the air.

After my mother finished packing his lunch, my father kissed each of us goodbye and started off to work. I quickly finished eating and hurried to get dressed. School was canceled, and soon we would hear the shouts of the children playing in the streets. It would be another day of sledding; of making snow men; of eating snow ice cream made from a scoop of fresh snow, a teaspoon of vanilla, and plenty of sugar; of snowball battles; and of napping on the floor behind the stove, like a hibernating cub bear.

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