The Good Old Days

First rain, then sleet, then snow began to fall. For a little while it fell thick and heavy and reminded me of the days I spent living in southwest Virginia. Some winters there brought so much snow that the only way I could get in and out of my house was through the chimney. I kept a snowmobile parked on the roof during winter months. On weekdays I would get up early to defrost the frozen shower faucets with a hair dryer. Then I would bathe, dress, and head up the chimney to go to work. Popping out of the chimney, I would get on my snowmobile and follow the tops of utility poles into town.

But even worse was the cold. One winter it was so cold, chickens walked into the KFC and hopped into the pressure cooker. It was so cold, I saw a dog wearing two cats as ear muffs. It was so cold, flashers in the park were handing out photos. It was so cold, I spent an entire day inside a walk-in freezer to stay warm.

But we didn’t mind. In fact, we liked it. We thrived. People were tough then. Those were the good old days, and we knew it. Friends often said to me, “Isn’t it great to be living in the good old days?”

Even better than my good old days were my parents’ good old days. For example, when I was eight months old my parents drove from Florida to Virginia in an old pickup truck. There were no interstate highways then so we drove hundreds of miles on a three-lane highway. The center passing lane, used by traffic in both directions, was called the suicide lane. My dad drove while I slept in my mother’s arms. In those days seat belts were unheard of, and everyone knew that if you have a collision in a vehicle without seat belts, you want to be holding a baby in your arms – it will soften the blow when your body hits the unpadded steel dashboard. But even if my mother had been wearing a seat belt, in a head-on collision I would have shot through the windshield like a rocket. And we liked it that way. It was survival of the fittest. And the luckiest.

Today’s snow stopped after dusting the ground with a paltry three inches of whiteness. In my day, we called that frost. Around the water cooler at work you could have heard:

“Say, that was a heavy frost we got this morning, eh?”
“Yep, I almost decided to wear shoes today.”

Nowadays, a storm is on the local news for a week before and another week after it hits. People today are soft. In my day we walked five miles barefoot through snow to get to school. And did it again to get home. It was uphill … both ways. And we liked it.