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| February 7, 2020 - my back yard |
It never snowed in Oklahoma when I was a kid. But once — I must have been four or five years old — we had a massive ice storm. A willow tree stood a few feet from our house, odd now that I think of a willow tree growing in that dry, played out soil — the same tree that donated supple branches that Mom used now and then to whip across the backs of our legs in punishment. “A switching.” That’s what she called it but like any whip, the result was the same: stinging, stinging, burning, thin raised red welts on the backs of tanned bare legs. As my memory spools back on those days, I reach my calves to rub away the pain, seventy years later.
That morning, incased in inches of ice, the willow morphed into one of those clear glass trees — the kind we watched a man with a blow torch make at the State Fair — “lamp work,” the technique I’ve since learned to name. Not only the tree but the entire universe outside our door looked clean and shiny and impossibly alien.
Pauline, a friend of my older sister, came skidding down the middle of our street on ice skates. It never occurred to any of us to wonder how Pauline, a teen ager growing up in the Dust Bowl, happened to own ice skates, just waiting in back of her closet for just such event as this natural ice arena. That she could actually use them is as great a mystery. Watching her, I couldn’t wait to put on boots and try that slide-walk.
Boots. We called galoshes. Mine were red. Rubber high top overshoes that were the devil to get on and off even with the Wonder Bread plastic bags we put over our inside shoes first. Galoshes were designed for rain. Or maybe dirt. With no bottom tread, they were not so good for ice but that’s what we had. Not skates. Not those special lace up pure white Cinderella slippers with impossibly thin blades on the bottom that let you whoosh across the road’s glassy surface.
Maybe it didn’t really matter; the ice melted with an afternoon sun. But for that morning, it mattered to my sister. She watched Pauline, floating down the street, like I watched older kids who had bikes, innately knowing that with wheels and gears came the twins: freedom and independence.
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| February 7, 2020 |
3 comments:
The whipping made me teary-eyed. This is a gritty, wonderful blogpost memory. Thank you, Shirley .
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