Thoughts on Winter Hiatus
Forty years ago when I was in elementary school, there was a wonderful time of year that stretched from early December through early March. Growing up in Swords Creek, Virginia, on a dirt road meant the first December snows gave us a nice, two-inch thick ice layer above the gravel and red clay. If we were fortunate, and in the mid to late seventies we often were, this ice layer would remain in place for the better part of four months. Ice meant no school. And, no school, even for a kid who loved school, was a wonderful thing. Russell County had numerous dirt roads such as the one I lived on, many of them narrow twisting things that were hard to navigate even on a good day. A school bus had no hope of delivering cargo in ice, so the students stayed home, sometimes for six weeks at a time. Snow days were filled with sledding, sometimes down mountainsides and into ravines that make the adult in me doubt the sanity of the nine-year-old. There was the time when I hit a mogul wi