Walk Into Winterland

You who stayed home glued to TV pro football Sunday missed living. The wife and I and our lady boxer braved the afternoon chill and headed for where we could drain the most out of Nature's early display of what's to come these dreary months ahead. And believe us, it was worth it, every moment of it.

We took an old familiar walk where the mood has changed with the season. As we left our School Street home to cross Broadway we eyed the bay to note a pale gray sea below leaden skies beyond the brilliance of snow-topped trees. We were nearing the gateway to a winter wonderland. It was like a picture postcard parade as we sauntered up School Street with snow frosted red pom-poms on bushes, and heavily togged youngsters getting their first thrill of winter in making snowballs.

Seldom have we seen so obliging a baby storm, with enough snow to crown the landscape yet leaving the roads so bare that even the most timid autoist will venture upon it. So we weren't so alarmed when the first solid citizen we met opined "28 more storms to come" basing it on the old adage that there'll be as many snows as the date on which the first one falls.

The brook was gurgling merrily beneath the snow-crushed barberry bushes. This is the same brook that steals through Mabel Woodfall's yard and finally winds up into Sandy Bay. It's a lively brook refreshed by rains. We saw our first genuine snowman of the winter. It was magnificent in Tommy Dolan's yard on School Street. He might have made it, for all we know. It certainly had "oomph" and a wee bit of Irish dignity. And it took us back quite a few years in recalling how many of such we helped to make with the aid of our young fry, and the snow tunnels we helped build and then painfully crawled through ahead of the more agile youngsters. So many times, the wife and I ask why do they have to grow up?

To our Molly, snow was not so beautiful as it was utilitarian. A new medium in which to belly-roll, snout and sniff, a field in which to smell out agile squirrels and run them up the nearest tree, hoping to catch them, but not knowing what to do with them if she ever succeeded. After all, the old gal is a softie at heart. She's just jealous of that bushy tail because they bobbed hers at birth.

A seasonal decoration on a door on the Bob Talbot house at 25 School Street was a basket with cat o' nine tails woven through the wicker and gold leaves intertwined. It brought in the harvest idea along with the Fall.

Up Pleasant Street, we came upon the town highway department's sand stockpile, where a fond daddy was showing his youngsters how to do a Robin Hood with bow and arrow. Skirting the cemetery we looked behind us to catch a background that would defy an artist's canvas. A snow-white rifted cloud bank of gray, blending into glistening crystaled bushes and trees, a solid mass of whitened pleasure that words bow in shame to describe.

And then came reality in the person of an overgrown hound dawg that apparently felt Molly was her mortal foe. They were all for tussling, but firm parent that I am, the order was given to break and for a wonder, she did. The hound, too, had had enough of such shenanigans.

It was here that we came upon our only meeting of a fellow man on this stroll through wonderland. Fire Chief Guy Thibeault was also enjoying to the fullest what the day had to bring. He was near his created pond, and woodland. In the pond were the geese and ducks he had placed there. Here the wintry background and the pond scene itself were inspirational.

The boxer dashed for the fowl, even to braving the chilled waters. But she never can get into her head that birds only have to take to the air to beat her. They did,, and all she could do was yap. Guy told us that last week two pair of Canadian geese paid him a visit and left four days later for parts unknown. He loves the area and wants to preserve it for wildlife rather than build camps along the banks of the pond. Our town can stand a lot more thinking in that direction if we are to continue Rockport as a right nice place in which to live and raise our children.

We were sorry, the wife and I, that we didn't meet you on the walk, for we are all too aware that seldom will any of us have to the chance to be in such wintry beauty of a Sunday afternoon.

J.P.C., Jr.