Getting through winter

By Milt Gross

I’ve never known quite how to get through winter, but I always do.

It takes a lot of waiting, I understand that now that I’m gaining in age experience. I’m not quite as eager to get out there into that beautiful winter day as I once was.

On a day off, while living in South Paris, which in winter felt like very North Paris, I’d look out the window at all that white beauty, grab my skis and head for the great outdoors. These days I look out the window and then check the calendar to ascertain how many more winter days there are left.

This year I’m looking forward to spring, when my other hip will have been replaced and both legs are feeling good again. We have made a few plans for those wonderful days ahead, such as visiting Fort Western in Augusta, going to the Maine State Museum in that same town, heading for Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park for some walking on “new” legs, and visiting various places up and down Maine’s coast where I’ll be able to walk on those “new” legs.

The great outdoors of the past makes me think immediately of the wooded hills and hilly fields north of South Paris where I lived a dozen years. There I could cross-country ski for miles, accompanied by our black lab whose main activity would be to step onto the trail right in front of me and sit down while she waited. My main activity, because this always occurred on a downhill, was to scream at her and try somehow to miss her. I always missed but never have figured out how I did.

I always missed the snowmobiles too, largely because I could hear them coming and they had heard my doggie-bound screams. I generally skiied on their trails, stepping well off the trail so those snowmobilers, whom I knew from our fish and game club, could laugh at me as they went flying past.

Up in Danforth, I had a friend who snowmobiled a lot. He used his seat more than his feet, because there was a lot more to his seat than to his feet. I never watched him snowmobile, but I wondered how that seat fit onto that seat.

I was just learning to cross-country ski in those days, because the superintendent of schools in whose junior high school I taught, took me one snowy day to the hill leading into the town dump. His purpose was to sell me his cross-country skis. He succeeded.

I very nervously made it down that hill, but soon learned to make it down — and up — others in that area. My most memorable day was back in that area north of South Paris, where I paused and watched a few deer standing down below me on a hillside looking up and watching me. A wonderful winter scene.

In those days, I was married to my first wife, who, when skiing made it a point to wear a long, heavy coat in case she fell. She didn’t want to hurt herself. She fell but never hurt herself. Watching her ski sometimes made me want to give up the whole thing as too risky. Other times it was amusing.

Guys, don’t show the next sentence to your wife. Isn’t it always fun to watch your wife struggle and fall while cross-country skiing?

Sometimes it was so cold on open, snowy fields that my glove-covered hands grew too cold for comfort. My feet never seemed to have felt that cold. But my hands did, and on those outings I wondered why I was so enjoying those outings.

Guys, do you ever wonder why you do things that hurt so much?

But when we lived in Steuben, I gave up skiing. That was because I managed to break my old wooden skies while clambering over a pile of logs that someone who was not cross-country skiing had left in my way. I made it home on a ski and a half and never went out on them again.

Up in the notch north of Grafton Notch my first wife and I stood by a snow-covered fireplace and gazed at the beauty of the snow sliding off 4,150-foot Old Speck across the notch. It was beautiful and wild and cold looking. I’ll never forget that beauty.

Now I look out my study window and gaze at the beauty of the snow-bordered drive heading out to the main road.

I may not walk out there today.

Snow is a lot prettier when you’re not limping on walking poles, trying not to fall down where you get a different view of that white stuff.

It’s better to look down or across at snow than look up at it.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes atlesstraveledway@roadrunner.com.