Sunday Scribblings, A Winter Story.

G'Day,
How are things at your house? Getting cold , or are you expecting things to get warm like I am here in the southern hemisphere? We are of course just a day away from the first official day of summer. But.... since the prompt for this week is winter, here is my blaze' little addition.

Winter time,
And the livin' is freezy,
Fish are crunchin',
And the cotton is brown,
Mum's a bitch,
And your Daddy's gone looking,
So clutch little baby,
Won't you cry.
Now really, that's not very nice is it? Either is winter to me, I was born in a heat wave, and I don't like being cold, especially now that I have aches and pains from arthritis to put up with. Though I do enjoy the fresh cold winter time air filling my lungs outdoors, as compared to the humid or sometimes stifling heated air we get in the summer here.
Winter here, where I am is pretty cold, but not so cold as it is in parts of the northern hemisphere where they get feet of snow and ice. The mountains in Australia do get snow for probably 4 months of the year, if they're lucky, and the mountains are not that far away from us. Just a few hours drive. From here, we can see some snow on the mountains for a little while in winter. When that wind blows off the snow it cuts into you and bites through your clothes. The closest snow to here in is an area called the Corrin forest. I think that is how you spell it.
Um, a winter story.
When I was in my teens we often went to the snow from where we were living in Wagga. We would go to either Mt Selwyn which was the closest or sometimes down into Victoria to Mount Buffalo or Falls creek. That was good fun but being the wimp that I am, a few hours playing there and I would want to get warm again. We would hire snow chains, boots and plastic toboggans to play with and ride on the ski lifts, but I never tried skiing.
When we first started going up there we used to take a plastic baby bath to slide down hill in and make our own toboggan runs because the proper ones were not made and groomed like they are now. We took thick plastic garbage bags that we had to coax eagerly down the hills sitting on our bums to make them slide, when they got moving it was fun, albeit, a bit of a rough ride. Consequently one or the other of us always came home with skin off or bruised bits somewhere on our body.
One time my friend Sandra slid down the track we had made on a steep bank in the soft snow, but she went off course and was stopped suddenly with both legs and arms wrapped around a tree.
Another time an old boyfriend, Robert, took us girls up there and he hit a rock that was covered over with snow and smashed his leg, he was the only driver amongst us too. Also on the way home on the same trip the bonnet on his car flew up and got stuck, blocking all vision, that was pretty scary until we came to a stop. Robert was well known for his bomb cars, but was he good fun anyway. Another time I went as a chaperone on a school bus full of 13 and 14 yr olds to Falls creek and was walking along a bank and fell through the branches of a covered over bush and got stuck, that was pretty funny. I must have been 17 myself, old enough to chaperone, he he. There was heaps of snow that year and it was just about a white out by the time we left.
Nowadays tourism is a big industry in winter up there and for your own comfort you pay stupid prices to hire just about everything , and forget accommodation, from what I have heard it is overpriced and I wouldn't bother.
I have not been up to the ski resort areas for a number of years but I saw a bit of light snow on the drive we went on last weekend, just 1 week away from the start of summer. I heard on the news that they got 20cm at Thredbo that weekend. Weird.
So yeah I do know what winter is like. I have felt the way snow flays against your face and stings when it is falling heavily like it could cut your skin. I know what it is like to have feet in inappropriate footwear, like sneakers and they pain and go numb and you can't wait to get warm again, and your fingers in wet soggy woolen gloves, and that if you wear your new denim jeans in the snow it bleaches the colour out and dyes your legs denim blue. Then you end up with a pair of jeans with a white bum and knees in them, he he.
We took the boys to the snow for the first time when they were about 2 and 4, before we had Annie. They loved the idea of us towing them around in the toboggan but were much more interested in tasting and eating the snow than actually getting out in it. It was good fun though. Experiencing with them their first snow trip.
When the boys were a bit older and we had moved into our Junee house, one of the tricks I would use to get them out of bed on cold mornings to go to school was, we would go out the front yard to the bird bath and get the disk of solid ice and use it to bowl down the center of the road and down the hill. To much giggling and excited jumping up and down when the ice rolled all the way to the bottom of the hill.
But I love summer, you can have much more fun finding ways to keep cool, especially near water and the beautiful weather of the between seasons in spring and autumn.