A Winter’s Tale

March 18, 1998

(With apologies to Will S)

FIRE AND ICE
“Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”
- Robert Frost

“Abide the change of time
Quake in the present winter’s state and wish
That warmer days would come.”

(Posthumus, CYMBELINE, Act II, Sc. iv)

I do not believe I could ever be persuaded to live in a wintry climate again. Here on the Gulf Coast, it is a cold snap when the temperature dips to the fifties. I put on a sweater or jacket when most guys around here are in their shirtsleeves.

This sensitivity or distaste for chilly weather may have been engendered by the years I lived in St. Lawrence County or Rochester, N.Y. But an event in my childhood may have also etched on my bones this affection for warmth and dislike of cold.

I was probably eleven years old, I recollect, because my father was still living. As I may have mentioned in other writings, I was somewhat of a roamer as a child; and often enough went off by myself.

One very cold winter day, well below freezing, I was in the Mt. Hood reservation, a county or state area with a lovely pond. The pond was frozen over. I walked out on the ice and broke through, soaking myself up to the neck.

Climbing out, drenched, I made the couple miles back home. I was chilled to the bone. My clothes froze on me. When I reached home, my mother stood by me at the kitchen range as I painfully shed my clothes. I still have some sort of trace auditory memory of the crunching sound as my frozen clothes hit the floor.

Put to bed with wrapped, heated flatirons at my feet, thoroughly blanketed, I knew the blessing of warmth.

However, the next morning, I could not move my legs. My mother called Dr. Listernick, unusual for her as she had not much faith in the medical profession. He came. (House calls were not that unusual then). I have no recollection of what he prescribed, but in a couple of days I was up and a bout, seemingly with no after-effects. “He gave you strong medicine,” my mother said later, “And that’s why you do not have rheumatic fever.” I believe that was her diagnosis, not Dr. Listernick’s.

Thus, as Phil Harris used to sing, “And that’s what I like about the South.”

P.S. That pond at Mt. Hood is the setting for a subsequent musing, “A Summer Reverie.”