A RIDE ON SKIES LATE AT NIGHT

bed.During those cold winter nights on our old farm, after supper I would gaze out a window and see the moon light shining off the ice-covered snow, beckoning me to come out there and take a ski ride down two hills next to a barbed-wire fence only a few yards from our driveway.  I couldn't escape the temptation and throwing on my warmest winter coat and mittens, with the same boots I wore to our barn everyday, and would go into our woodshed and find those long skies with a leather strap right in the middle of each one of them.

As I left the woodshed, I would pick up a couple of long poles to use to steady myself as I would ski down both of those hills.

With the north wind at my back, I would push off and soon I was gliding down the first hill gathering more speed as I went; I bent close to the snow in order to not fall over and at the bottom of that first hill, I would sling-shot off the next one and gathered even more speed.  Now I was full of the feeling of being carried by the brisk wind to my back, the moon still shining off the ice-covered snow..I finally can to another barbed-wire fence and had to point both skies into a v shape so I could finally stop.

Turning around I could make out a distant light coming from that same window which had beckoned me outside.  It was a very long way from where I had stopped.

Now my challenge was how to make my way back to that old farm house and stay out of that biting northern wind.  At first I started up the long valley between both hills, but soon learned that is where the cold north wind funneled down even stronger than I thought it would.  So I decided to retrace my steps and seek shelter by going side-ways against the last hill and there the cold north wind was bearable.

I though I could climb back under the barbed-wired fence where our pig-pen was, but when I arrived there, the snow had piled firmly against a lot of the barbed-wire fence.  Besides, I didn't want to land in the pig pen because I knew our one pig would be sound asleep in a little shed we had built for it, in order to protect her from those cold winter night winds.

From there, I moved all along the barbed-wire fence until I finally came to the place where I had first crossed it, and taking those two long skies, I lifted them and stuck each one as deeply as I could in the ice-covered snow on the other side of the fence.  Then I merely threw those two poles and heard them hit and away they both sailed down toward the barn;  there they would strike the barn and stop.

After climbing back over the Barbed-wire fence, I retrieved both skies and carried them back into our woodshed and placed them against one wall where they wouldn't be able to fall down.

Creeping back inside, I could smell that old pot-bellied wood stove still churning out a lot of good heat.  There are our dining room table both of my grand parents were sitting, granddad was writing a letter with an old pencil to a niece of his back in Wisconsin, and Grand mother was busy putting her Sunday School lesson together for next Sunday.  There still was some bean soup out in our small kitchen, so I scoped another small bowl of it, along with some home-made bread and butter.  I climbed up on an old sofa near the wood stove, and ate my soup and bread, butter, warming myself up as I soon knew I would need to go upstairs to where I slept each night.

Granddad always opened the door that led to those stairs, so some of the warmth from the wood stove would go up the stairs, in order to warm up where I was going to go to bed.

I kissed them both good night, and remembering where I had been and what I did that night, that would be what I thought about as I snuggled deeply beneath a lot of heavy blankets on my bed. Remembering true stories like this now, I still think about what I did then, when I was just a young boy, having some fun, during the cold winter nights in upstate NY.