Winter Thoughts

It has been so bitterly cold the last couple of days and I have had so many things tumbling around in my head I want to get out.



The first of these is that my life comes to me in flashes and it seems to me maybe that is what they mean when they say your whole life flashes before you right before you die. I mean think about it, some people go out in a split second, some die slowly, so I mean, sometimes that movie must run awfully fast. But no, I think it is more like as we age our life comes to us in flashes and some things we forget and some things we remember because all of it becomes just too much for our brains.



So my life isn't going to be some sequential journey like the biographies you read of the stars, you know, parents, your birth, childhood, events etc. This is going to meander like a creek that has forgotten it is supposed to have any forward momentum.



So this bitter cold brought on a memory of one walk home from school. I can't say how old I was but it was somewhere in the early 1960's. At that time I wore my Mum's winter boots, I don't know why, but I do know they were suede and didn't come up very high, they zipped down the middle at the front and they got those white marks on when they got wet. The other kids all laughed at me for wearing them and I told them I was grateful for all the sacrifices my Mum made for me.



At that time girls had to wear skirts down to the knee and knee high white socks for school year round. What kind of sadistic person dreamed that one up I will never know, but that is how it was. Girls didn't wear trousers even in the dead of winter. So this one particular day I am walking home and a hail storm starts. The misery of it has stayed with me to this day as the wind whipped the falling hail stones and the hail stones whipped my legs, stinging every bare inch of skin until I was sobbing. I don't know how many times I made that journey, how many times I made that walk, but that is only one of two that I remember to that particular house in the four years we lived there.



The other walk also sticks in my memory and I am not sure what season it was. All I know is that all the kids were talking about the accident outside school. Leasowes Primary school outside the infant school, Stafford, 1960's. It was a little boy no more than 5 or 6 I believe. He had come out of school and so the story went saw his Mom and ran across the road and a car hit him. I think the enormity of it was just too much for us kids and I went with the others to look at him. It was a terrible sight, he was lying on his back, eyes closed if I am remembering right because what I really remember is how white he was, chalk white, even his lips and all this dark stuff on the road and at that point I guess the ambulance had arrived and they realised other kids were just staring. They covered him up, he was dead. If his Mum should ever read this someday, I just so wanted to run to you and hug you and I just don't know what I would have said.. there were no words. But know that he probably saved countless lives from that day onward, that he truly became an angel. Because as dippy as I can be wherever I have crossed a road in whatever country I have been in, your son has been right there in the back of my mind and I am sure in the minds of children and their children, not forgotten, nor the harsh lesson his death taught us.



Life is full of lessons, and I learned one of my biggest ones in another winter.



One of the things snowfalls were great for was sledding. At the third house I lived in we had a great hill that was just made for it. One day I was out there with my boy friend and we decided to race each other. I am a pretty competitive person and I was very determined to win. At the bottom of the hill was a row of people's back gardens and their fences were all wood paling fences, light posts strung and held in place by wire. I think I thought what was going to happen was that the fence would stop the sled and I would win, so when he shouted, brake BRAAKKEE. Guess what dear friends? Yeahhh I didn't. What I did not think of was that yes the sled would stop but the momentum was going to carry me forward off it, my mind just is that way, so I was surprised when my head hit the fence hard. Ohhhh the pain.. I think I screamed in agony and all I could do was roll around and hold my head yelling and probably crying too. It's a wonder I didn't split my skull.

Let's just say physics was never my strong point.