Sunday Ramblings

It is still too cold to leave the house unless there is a damn good reason to so I stayed in yet another day. Reading, surfing on the Net, some art work and playing with the pup. We finally did cook the New years ham but basically did inside stuff.

It's the two coldest months of the year and as I sat in side and looked out I saw sheets of ice on the sidewalk, where the snow will melt leave a very shallow pool of water on the walk which freezes hard during these old spells.

In Boise where I grew up the New York canal cut thew our property. The New York is a huge irrigation canal which waters farm through south west Idaho. The canal, for the most part has cement sides and bottom . The floor is flat so when the last day of irrigation is completed and the flow of water is stopped large pools of water remain on the floor of the canal. Some places the water can be a couple of feet deep. There is of course fish trapped in these pools and we would have great fun hunting these , usually suckers with rocks or pitch forks. However, by December the fish were gone and most of the water but there were always a few long, wide sheets of water which would freeze into ice. My two friends John and Tom and my brother Ross found we could simulate skating by sliding our feel on the ice. We then found long tree limbs broke them off at the joint which would make respectable hockey sticks. Add a fairly flat and round stone and we would have a puck. We would then play hockey all morning long. We found we had to play in the morning because as the day warmed the ice would melt. The New York runs East to West and we discovered the sun rarely rose high enough to hit the South most side of the canal and there the ice would stay the longest.

Following the first year we discovered ice in the canal the four of us ordered ice skates for Christmas and got them! Ice skates opened up a whole new experience. Speed and grace far above sliding on the ice with your shoes. We skated the canal and we were even lucky enough to find skateable patches of ice on the Boise River by John and Tom's place.

By the middle of February the ice was gone as the season turned toward Spring. The skate were thrown to th back of my closet to patiently wait for another winter. It's weird but it seems to me that no long after that the Boise winters did not seem to get so cold as the winters once did. Global warming? This was the early 60's years and wars before the menace of global warming was thought of. The only threat in the sky then was Sputnik, Russian ICBMs and the occasional UFO.

On cold days like today its nice to reflect back on a time when the colder it got the better it was.