Bobbie Wayne's Blog

Short writings by Bobbie Wayne, writer, musician and visual artist. Her stories have appeared in The Ravens Perch, Intrinsick, SLAB, Blueline Magazine, and Colere literary journal. Her new book "Lifelines" is available from Amazon.

A SEASON OF WHITE

As Dan and I drive through the hilly, bumpy streets of Marblehead which shine with the rain pelting down I think of my childhood winters on Long Island and how important the weather was to the holiday season. By mid-December, the grass was long since dead, the ground frozen solid and crunchy underfoot. Our parents sent us out to play, regardless of how hard the frigid winds were blowing. It never rained in December. We slid on every icy patch we could find, hunted for ice-sickles to lick and delighted in shattering any thin sheets of ice we could find with our scuffed brown shoes. 

Every time the mail arrived, we hoped it would contain the Sears catalogue, which was nearly as thick as a phone book and contained endless pages pf toys. We kids wrote our names next to the toys we hoped for, both from parents and Santa Claus. I didn’t bother to ask how Santa would know what we had checked off in the Sears catalogue. I had seen him live in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with his wife and had sat on his lap at Macy’s. If he had a deal going with Macy’s, I figured he probably had a connection with Sears as well. 

Waiting for the bus every morning meant nose-blowing and hopping up and down to keep our toes from freezing. We poked and chased each other until the bus finally arrived. In school, we were jittery with anticipation. The December sky, grey and still, seemed to be holding its breath. Then, the first snow would begin in flurries. Wild with delight, we would spin, arms outstretched, heads tipped back so we could catch snowflakes on our tongues. 

At home, we were reluctant to come inside, even for lunch, when there was snow. Mothers stuffed their kids into snow pants, galoshes, sweaters, hats, earmuffs and mittens before they allowed them to go out. Long Island snows were often deep enough to make the roads impassible. We prayed for the voice on the morning radio to say, “Schools are closed today in Nassau County.” But often, our mothers sent us off on foot to walk the mile to school in swirling gusts that quickly filled the sidewalks and streets with mountains of white. Leaping in and out of drifts, making snow angels and dodging snowballs, we would find that the school had closed by the time we reached it. Once we made it back home, our lips would be blue, our fingers frozen and the clips on our galoshes iced over. But our mothers were ready with hot cocoa and graham crackers. They stripped us of our wet, frozen clothes and tossed them over radiators to dry. An hour later, we’d be begging to go out again.

On weekends, whole families went ice-skating on the model boat pond at Salisbury Park. We kids wore double-bladed strap-on skates that wobbled and caused us to trip. Parents in their long dopey coats hauled their progeny across the ice in-between them. In a photo from 1952, my mother and I both wear wool babushkas. I look knock-kneed and about to fall. My dad wears a fedora. All around us is a sea of people; all of us resembling refugees more than skaters.

By Junior High, there were holiday parties where we danced the Hora to Jingle Bells. Someone’s parent would drop us giggling thirteen-year-olds at Roosevelt Field, Long Island’s first shopping mall. Loaded down with Christmas gifts and stuffed with pizza, we would pile back into a parent’s car at the end of the day while the snow made little whirlwinds on the parking lot.

The last few weeks in December were always crisp, cold periods where fathers struggled to put up strings of colored lights. Trees were chosen and hauled home on car roofs. By now, the sledding hill had a layer of ice which grew thicker with each snowfall, packed hard by the red metal runners of our Flexible Fliers. At night, people would bundle up and drive through the neighborhood to see each other’s decorations. Jewish neighbors set their electric menorahs in their windows. With the Christmas cookies baked, the presents wrapped, long before the lumpy snowmen began to melt, a hush would finally settle over the town…”all is still, all is bright.”

In 2023 New England where the Atlantic Ocean is warming faster than other areas of the Eastern Seaboard, we don’t get much snow in December. Kids go coatless, running around in t-shirts and shorts outside as if it were spring. Our yards are still green and my roses have a few buds on them still. We have explosions of ladybugs on the days when the temperature goes above fifty degrees. And then, of course, we have that enemy of holiday cheer: rain. 

I hope New England continues to have snowfalls in December. As inconvenient as it can be, I miss the kindness snow brings out in people: folks working together to get a car out of a snowbank and neighbors shoveling out sidewalks and driveways for those who can’t do it themselves. I miss the misshapen snowmen, the impromptu snowball fights and the parents sledding down hills with their kids. I even miss things getting shut down, leaving us to sit in front of windows and contemplate the silent world outside, the world without car noise and trucks hitting the potholes. Although everyone knows there was never snow in Bethlehem, it doesn’t seem like Christmas without passing a full-sized manger scene in a churchyard, complete with shepherds, sheep, kings on camels, and angels outside of a stable: all wearing a little dusting of snow. 

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Wednesday, 19 February 2025