This is Pastor Tim’s Newspaper Article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, Jan 16, 2024
I am looking at the weather for the foreseeable future and I am not seeing anything that I much like. I really hate snow, I mean with a white hot passion I hate it. I know that a lot of you like it, and I am happy for you, but I personally am not a fan.
As I sit here and reflect on this, I find that my hatred of snow has not always been here. In fact, I can remember a time many years ago when I thought that snow was pretty cool. My dad was a construction worker and he worked for a construction company in Lima. That means that often during the wintertime, Dad was laid off a lot. He would have occasional jobs, but it would be hit and miss most winters.
When we would have a snow day growing up, it usually meant we were home with Dad. Mom would go to work, and then it was Dad running the house. I can remember one particularly snowy winter where we had a 5-foot drift behind our house that was there so long that it got as hard as a brick wall. One snow day when we were off from school, we got a shovel out and chipped away at that drift until we got a tunnel that ran all the way through. We were going through the tunnel so much that it became smooth along the bottom. A little running start and you could build up a head of speed and when you came out the back of the tunnel, where there was tumbling and snow flying everywhere.
Which meant we had no choice but to dig a second tunnel and go through it enough to smooth it out so we could have races. Once we had both tunnels up and running, we then decided to dig a connection between the two tunnels so you could go through the tunnel on one side and come out the other.
It was so cold that winter that those racing tunnels were there for over a week. By the time the sun started melting them, we had wore the bottom of that tunnel down to being nearly a sheet of ice. Even the walls of the tunnel were worn smooth. My cousins came over and we had some epic wipeouts at the end of that tunnel. I will admit, we also had some crashes in the middle of the tunnel because of the probably ill-advised connection we dug between the two. It was a blast.
You have no idea how blessed I was to have a Dad who did things like that with us. When Mom came home from work, she had a fit about how we were going to get hurt flying through the tunnel. Dad told her we had been practicing most of the day and most of the danger spots had been smoothed out. Including the spot in the middle where we hadn’t dug the middle out enough and I got wedged. He pulled me out by my feet and both of us were more concerned about collapsing the tunnel than anything with my safety. In order make sure it didn’t happen again, I took that stupid winter coat I was wearing off. I fit through much better that way.
Sure, we missed a few days of school because of the snow, but I got something much better in return. I got to build a snow racetrack with my Dad that was so fast I could beat my sister through it. I was drenched and while I don’t remember it now, I am sure I was sick afterward. I am also sure that Dad paid for that “practicing most of the day” comment.
To this day, I have never witnessed a faster snow tunnel than that one. It has been years since those huge drifts form at the back of our house. My sister and her family built a home behind my parents house so the way the wind travels through the backyard, that big drift doesn’t form any more. But it sure was fun that day. My hands feel cold thinking about it, but I would trade building that race snow tunnel for anything you could offer me.
Don’t get me wrong, I still hate snow with a white-hot passion. But I have to admit, I didn’t hate it as much that day. It was a good memory for a kid who got to spend a day doing stuff with his Dad. I know that money was tight when I was growing up, not because my parents ever told me that, but I saw what was going on. Dad being laid off during the winter made things tough, but I really appreciated that Dad got to have that particular day at home.