By the 1970’s, we had moved to the country near Morse. I was driving one of my husband’s hand-me-down cars – a big green Pontiac that was solid as a tank. Our dead-end road was about the last place the snow plows cleared after a snowstorm and I sometimes had to drive my kids the quarter-mile to the plowed blacktop to meet the school bus. In the interest of better traction, my husband had added weight to the back wheels by loading the trunk with bags of water-softener salt. The theory was logical but the effect was nearly disastrous. Apparently he over-did it and the added weight had a teeter-totter effect, resulting in the front tires being lifted slightly from the road and providing little control of the steering.
One snowy morning I somehow made it safely to our rendezvous with the school bus, but the return to our house had me sliding all over the road, the front end leaping into the air like a clown car, and I eventually ended up half-way in the ditch only yards from home. Needless to say, a good deal of the salt went into the water-softener tank where it had a much better result.
Our daughter Jennifer was born in February of 1967 while we were living in Iowa City’s historic Goosetown district. Our sons had all been springtime babies and we had not given much thought to the possible inconveniences of winter excursions for doctor appointments and the inevitable middle-of-the night rush to the hospital delivery room. My husband had bought one of the early Ford Broncos – great fun on our camping trips and, as it turned out, a real blessing when it came to getting me to those check-ups with my doctor in West Branch.
This winter baby had us a bit more cautious about me driving alone than with the others, so my husband insisted on driving me, in the Bronco which he had been driving when the roads were less than perfect. Fortunately, Mercy Hospital was only a few blocks away when our daughter chose Groundhog Day for her birthday, and we took a hasty ride in the Bronco, through snowy streets in the wee hours of that dark morning. As my husband discovered later that day, the family car, having been idle for weeks, probably wouldn’t have started that frigid night, so I’ve always been grateful for the Bronco. Years later, after moving to the country, all our kids including Jennifer learned to drive in that same Bronco.
One early December resulted in a special adventure with our daughter, and some lovely photos that resemble sepia prints. The pond hadn’t yet frozen and the water looked dark brown against the pristine white of the fresh snowfall. The heavy, wet snow clung in thick puffs on logs, stones and fallen branches all along the wooded shoreline. Everything was brown and white – and the rowboat was still fastened to a stump near the shore. Jennifer wanted to take the boat out on the water and view the scene from the middle of the pond. Thinking of the icy water and heavy clothing, I didn’t want her doing that alone, so I grabbed my coat and my camera and went in the boat with her. The scene was entirely new from the new perspective, we took many photos, some which were later transformed into watercolor paintings. It seemed a silly thing to do at the time, but some winters an early snowfall comes close to recreating that scene and reminds me of what a rare and magical adventure it really was.
Early one winter morning, sometime in the 1990’s, I let our two dogs out for their usual morning investigations when I caught a glimpse of something red in the snow by the kitchen steps. The dogs didn’t seem to notice it, but then they were busy churning up the blanket of snow that hid the dreary brown lawn. Still in my slippers, I decided that further investigation could wait until later. By noon, melted snow was dripping off trees and bushes and the dogs, in and out several times to warm up and gnaw packed snow out of their toes, had paid no attention to the red blob. It had changed not a whit and resembled a handful of red Jell-O. I thought about the cat in the hat and wondered if the blob would grow and turn the snow pink, but it just sat there, ignored apparently by the whole world (except for me.) When the snow was gone, so was the blob, a mystery to this day.