Winters Past

Ron Whitham..long time friend

So we are having this gorgeous almost spring day and I want to tell you about winter..you know this taste of spring is just a tease.

So my winter memories kind of fuse from one year to another.

But one momentous event was when Billy Assfelt Affelt took his beebee or air gun , filled it with snow and held it to my neck and shot it. This may have been around 3rd grade. I swear this was the beginning of my  nagging neck pain. I had a huge lump and couldn’t move my neck for days.

Good memories..sledding and skating. First sledding. My elementary ( you need to say it the Upstate NY way..el-e mean tar ee) school playground was on a great hill. I had a sled..but the rails were always rusty..not good. Lou Rappaport’s had great leftover boxes that really were awesome for sledding(sliding).  We spent lots of time on that hill. Not far was  Broome Community College( Broome Tech back then). They also had a great hill for sledding..and later years did some tobaganing there.

So skating…skates were bought at least 3 sizes too big..not enough money to buy skates every year. More room for lots of warm socks. We skated a lot on Cutler Pond. This was the place where the The Cutler Ice Company cut ice in the winter( pre refrigerator) . Urban legend was that one winter the ice gave way and the horses and ice truck were never recovered from the pond..but hey we were kids and this story didn’t scare us away.  The family we rented our house from was The Bolands. They lived up the hill from the pond..and they would let us warm up after hours of  skating. Another skating place was my back yard. We had a small area that my Mom would flood so that it could freeze . It was small..but still so fun. My friend Ron(in the above picture) couldn’t skate, so Mom would bring a chair out for him for balance. Ron developed Juvenile Diabetes when we were in elementary  and passed away a few years ago. The memory of him having to take insulin at such a young age is very profound.

So winter..glad it’s behind us again..