Winter 2019-20: Memories of cold

The temperature will not go above zero here for another hour, around 11:00 a.m. I woke this morning with my new iPad and decided to dedicate my day to be an indoor day. Sure, I went outside to pick up the paper, even after I had read it on the new iPad. And I expect to have a Valentine's Day dinner tonight with Dena, Abe and Jane at Cinders. But that will be about it.

So I eased into my day in bed, got up to make some of my famous salami and eggs, started a load of laundry, and reviewed my Quicken and Mint files.

The northeast Wisconsin sky is a stunning blue. And my Facebook memories reminded me that we had even colder wind chill in Timonium four years ago. So I have some perspective. Yet I never remember it being this cold in Eden. Back then, there were no wind chill factors to better inform me of the 'feels like' factor, so maybe I was fooled, but my guess is that the same lake effect that brought us so much snow also kept us a bit warmer in the winter -- and cooler in the summer.

We used an old -- circa 1935 -- tractor to plow the driveway back then. Shoveling was trivial but not insignificant. If we could get the tractor started on a cold morning, all I needed to do was to drive straight out of the garage to the end of our driveway and we'd have a path out of the deep snow. About another thirty minutes of clearing the large area in front of the barn and garage, and I'd have to get ready for school. This would have been between 1963 and 1969, after I was old enough to drive the plow and still not off for college. Of course I did plow a bit during the college years -- we'd get some epic snows when I was home for breaks at Thanksgiving and Christmas -- but by then there were at least two younger brothers home to handle that chore.

Having been raised in that place, snow, cold, plows, ice and other winter trappings were a given, something you learned to accommodate. Unlike the rest of my family, I never took to skiing, and I had more of an interest in playing basketball, not just staying indoors during the winter. We did have a small indoor court in the barn. Dad had replaced the center section of the wooden floor in the barn with concrete. The court was small but functional. I could spend an hour in the cold, dark barn, playing imaginary contests between the Eden Raiders team I hoped to be part of and an Eden opponent, usually North Collins. In my head, I'd construct a lineup for both teams, and often provide a play-by-play narrative as I dribbled and shot. But although I had a great year as a point guard on our freshmen team (1965-66) and made the junior varsity the following year, I tried and failed varsity basketball tryouts in both my junior and senior year. I probably attributed some of the problem to my brother Tom -- a year ahead of me -- quitting the team during his senior year due to lack of playing time, not instilling any goodwill with Coach Ed Sturm. Not that I deserved to make varsity, but it probably did not help in evaluating my potential contribution.

Basketball, not skiing, dominated my winters. Tryouts were right before Thanksgiving, with practice over the holidays before the season started in early December. Games were usually Tuesday and Friday nights, with a JC game at 6:15 or 6:45, followed by the varsity at 8:00. On Saturdays, especially in the years after failing to make varsity, I'd try desperately to get a ride to the high school gym, where they had a boring of pick up basketball, divided by age groups. While others took the school bus to Glenwood to ski, I'd try my best to hone my skills with some competition.

A group of my peers had also located a barn about two miles from our house that had a loft that could accommodate a scaled-down full-court basketball game. We had to climb over bales of hay and play in a pretty dark space, but we could play there for hours at a time, year round. In these days, before cell phones, the Internet, and other wireless, digital personal devices, the process to gather up enough players to play a game was a small miracle. But it was fun; we did not think of ourselves as lacking anything important.