With the longer hours of daylight, springtime no longer seems so far away. In a younger year, I really enjoyed the winter months. There often seemed more time to spare, and I would use this time mostly enjoying the outdoors.
In my late preteen years, I was given for Christmas a second-hand pair of snow shoes. Though they were too large for me, my lengthy legs soon adapted to the extra long step that enabled the heel to drag as it should, giving me comfortable access to the many narrow trails of wooded areas that surrounded.
“No Trespassing” signs were not familiar to us until much later, when selfish Toronto buyers moved into the area.
During a previous summer, from somewhere, someplace, by someone, I was given two, four-inch-wide, strips of straight-grained walnut hardwood that was an inch or more thick and eight feet in length.
With it came the suggestion that I make myself a pair of cross-country skis. This I did by soaking the tip ends for a month or more in a barrel of water, then placing a shaped block of wood between the well-soaked tips and clamping them together. With a little shaping, sanding and chiselling a full-length groove down the centre of each, and a further month drying in the shade of a shed, I had me a respectable pair of cross-country skis waiting to be varnished.
We had at the time two dogs, one an Airedale crossed with a wirehaired terrier and the other an offspring of his from the neighbour’s greyhound, which sported a brown and white-patched coat and the physical features of her greyhound mother. Her 20-foot bounds would take her over a fence and across a field in seconds long less than a minute. They worked great as hunting partners.
The crossbreed terrier’s keen and eager nose loved to stir the jackrabbits from their hiding places in the brush and snowbanks along the hedgerows. The greyhound, working by sight alone, would cautiously wait until the rabbit scurried across the field. Then the instantly-caught bunny would be brought back from the centre of the field and laid at my feet.
Many of my wintertime weekends would be spent on snowshoes or skis, enjoying the company of these dogs. Seldom did the soup pot, simmering on the back of our wood-burning cast-iron cook stove, lack a freshly dressed carcass of a newly caught rabbit, pheasant or partridge. Winter life, though chore-bound for an hour at dawn and sunset in the evening, was great on the farm.
Now, with lower ebb of ambition, I watch the six o’clock news on TV, just to keep abreast of the happenings. But when the sports shows come on, I turn away in confusion, frustration, or repeated boredom.
My thoughts are rooted in the fact my feelings are strong that a man wearing a helmet protecting the freedoms of his country is worth a damn site more than a man wearing a helmet protecting a puck on an indoor rink.
Am I wrong?
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105