Winter Wonderland or A Pain In The Neck?

I woke this morning at five and there it was! All eight inches of it with a moving curtain of goose feather flakes. (Don't try to describe it, Rhoda, that's been done before by better writers than you). I hurried from one window to another, giving little cries of admiration. My yard light and the street light showed its glories.

So, when is one enchanted and when is one made miserable by snow? Childhood delight at the sight of normally sober adults capering strangely and eager to play. Wooshing, out of control down steep slopes. Under attack from young males who are line bred from antiquity to throw things accurately. Pain, wet mouthed howling, dead fingers and toes. The glory of making a snowman. Back in the house with dead fingers cradling a mug of hot chocolate. NO SCHOOL!

I still made snowmen when I was living alone in my fifties. By then I was allowed to delight in the snow again after the years as a farmers wife when husband was made miserable by having to throw his good milk away because the milk lorry couldn't get through. He was losing lambs and pregnant sheep to marauding foxes. Frozen pipes in the old cowshed. Getting to distant cwms to feed outlying stock. Hay running out.

My masterpiece snowman was made at Dartington Hall near Totnes when I was staying the weekend there on a visit to my daughters who were at school there. In the grounds was a huge statue of a reclining woman by Henry Moore. She was rudely called Big Bottomed Bertha and a group of excited, creative girls helped me to re-create her, full size, in snow. She thawed slightly during the afternoon, and then, in the evening, she froze, iron hard. Unwittingly we had placed her on a path where cars traveled and They (the authorities) had to put a red lantern each side of her at night in case a car got into trouble with her iron form. She stayed like that throughout the cold spell, but I had returned to the farm and none of my team of creative girls sneaked on me.

So now? At ninety? Past gambolling in it. Too unsteady to build a snowman. Mewed up in my delicious warm house, scared to go out in case I fall and a bone breaks. Is it a Winter Wonderland or a Pain in the Neck? Today it's a Winter Wonderland. but it mustn't go on for too long. 18.12.20