My father was a soldier then
And times were very hard
When I was young.”
-Eric Burdon
Thinking back yesterday to winters of olde, how bone-chilling, skin-freezing cold they’ve always been at their worst, epitomized by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Thinking back to walking to and from school and, remarkably, after school, delivering newspapers in the dark on two very long blocks intersected by three avenues for five years.
Walking across a very long open field toward north for three years in high school. Once, even crashing my feet through shoreline ice on the Assiniboine River (like the man in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”) in grade 11. And yes, there are many other winter’s tales reminding me of Robert Service’s and Dylan Thomas’s poems.
At 72 now, these long, frozen winters of our discontent have become more impossible, threatening (Alberta’s flimsy power grid) and crueller than ever.
Here is a poem I wrote recalling starting my paper route in the dead of winter in grade 5. Day 1 on a frigid Arctic day like today here in Edmo.
“Feb-uary made me shiver With every paper I delivered. Bad news on the doorstep. I couldn’t take one more step.” –Don McLean (“American Pie”)