When you live in Ostwestfalen, you get used to Winter being a gray, damp thing. Overcast days are the norm, the Sun is a rare, but welcome visitor. For the last three days, we've had snow on the ground and temperatures hovering around zero on the Celsius scale ( 20s and 30s for the Fahrenheit Folk). For me, it is finally Winter. It probably won't last long, not like the November through March snowcover I remember from my childhood, marching down the mountain through a foot of the stuff to serve the 7 o'clock mass or marching back up it after school, walking on the iced over Rushbrook Creek (pretty good redundancy factor in that name) and falling through up to my waist, or weekends on Boot Pond with cousins testing the temerity of the ice with large rocks, which eventually dropped said cousins into the water. Skiing from the top of the mine road across US 6 and down the hill to Rushbrook Street, sometimes narrowly missing traffic, sometimes so close to it you ended the run with your buttocks as a brake and went out of control into a hedge or a ditch. But that was Winter, my way.
There were deer hunts when the entire forest was so quiet you could hear the animals breathing and the snow falling, so quiet the meditation took over and the hunt disappeared. Long walks through mountain meadows and stands of pine opening into sparse hardwood and finally back down low on the mountain to the empty expanse of rock and dirt and giant shovels of the strippings. John O'Hara once said that Winter in Scranton is suicide weather. Maybe, if you're a city kid, but for us mountain boys, Winter, 15 miles Northeast of Scranton is transcendtal weather. The same thing applies here, the lanscape and the cityscape transcend the gray with a coating of white and air which turns your breath into steam. It's a good thing. It's my kind of Winter.
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