The Hole In The Lake

There was no doubt about it. The lake, huge as it was, was frozen. All the way down. Or at least that was my impression. This same lake that I would swim in all summer long, was now not only walkable, but studded with all sorts of tiny shacks.

Young as I was, I couldn't figure out why anyone would put a little house on the lake, but my eyes knew it for a fact. What's more, smoke spiraled out of each tiny chimney. Puzzled, I questioned my mom as to what was going on. "They're fishing shacks," she told me. I hate to say it, but I didn't believe her. I suspected she was teasing me because of my never-ending bout of questions that went her way.

"No, really," I said, "what are they?" She repeated her answer. I decided to ask my dad. I knew he'd tell me the truth. He always was quick with explanations of things that puzzled me. "Dad's fishing," was all my mom said. Now I really didn't believe her. While we fished all summer on that lake, there could be no fishing now. The fish were probably all dead anyway. Frozen to death. That was my take on what happened each winter. What could live frozen inside ice?

"Do you see that little house right there?" my mom said as she pointed at the lake. "The brown one with the red door?" I saw it. It seemed to be far out on the lake, a couple blocks or so, and no real path to it other than footprints already in the snow. "That's where you dad is," she said. "Why don't you go visit him and see if he's caught any fish for supper."

With snow boots, winter coat, scarf around my neck and another around the lower part of my face and mittens on my hands, I began the trek to the red door. I was nervous. Last winter, a skater had fallen through the supposedly frozen river that ran behind our house and had drown. People said he skated too long past safe as the river was beginning to thaw. As a kid, that made a real impression on me. How can one tell if the ice is starting to thaw? Maybe dad wasn't safe in that little house. Maybe I should tell him to get out of there and back on frozen dirt. It was surely safer than frozen ice.

Not sure if dad was in the shack, I timidly knocked on the door. I knew my dad's voice. It was a distinctive voice that once heard, was seldom forgotten. I heard him say "Come in." So I pulled the red door open a notch, just to make sure things weren't melting and dad wasn't floating around in ice water. All seemed safe. So in I went.

He was sitting in a small chair, fishing pole dangling into a hole in the ice that looked to be about a foot across. At his feet lay three fish. Big ones. Walleye's and northern pike is what they looked like to me. The same kind we caught in the summer. I did wonder how one caught dead fish, but didn't have time to voice my question because dad's pole was bobbing in the water.

"Pull up a chair," is what dad said. "Do you want to fish with me?" I told him I'd only come to watch and why did he want to catch dead fish anyway?" He snickered. Then, like always, he carefully explained that deep lakes, like this one, never froze all the way to the bottom so the fish had plenty of space to swim around. I was dumbfounded. Another one of my theories tramped into dust.

I noticed a small stove in the corner and asked why it didn't melt the ice with its heat. "It isn't big enough," my dad replied. It only heats the air so it's comfortable in here. It isn't able to melt the ice." I looked around for signs of water puddles on the floor but there weren't any. I knew what melting ice looked like. Since I didn't see any evidence, I sat on the tiny stool and watched dad fish.

It was boring.

But hey, I was a little kid. I loved summer fishing. There was always a lot to see, even if the fish weren't biting. The shoreline, the waves, the old house on the island a mile offshore, birds, and flying bugs--especially my all time favorite--the dragonfly. They were such  pretty colors and always landing right on my rod where I could see them up close. But in this little house, there was nothing exciting to look at. Not once I'd pretty much memorized it.

Now, after all these years, I confess to the truth of the whole matter:  I knew all the while I was sitting in that little house that the hole in the ice wasn't big enough for my dad to fall through. But in my imagination, it was big enough for me. Better to high tail it while the getting was good because what if I stood up, lost my balance, and went head first into that hole? The horrors of it overcame my sense of well-being.

So I got the heck out of there and followed the footprints back to where I knew the land was. My Mamma didn't raise no dummies.

The Tale Of A Broken Bedsheet

Minnesota is cold in the winter. Any state that lies just south of the Canadian border is bound to have sub-zero temperatures for about four months of each year. That's how it was the winter I was nine.  That was the year I learned a valuable lesson concerning living in freezing temps. I learned it by being utterly disobedient. I can tell the tale now because mom is gone on to her reward. If she was still with us, she would likely be sending me on to my reward. I not only flagrantly disobeyed her, I did it with malice and forethought. Thankfully, she never found out.

When I was growing up in the 1940s, there were no clothes dryers as we have now. Mom trekked all our laundry down two flights of stairs into the dreaded basement. You've heard me talk of being sent down there to retrieve jars of summer-canned fruits and vegetables for our winter table, and while all three of us girls despised going down into its dark and dank reaches, it was I who hated it the most. Too much imagination I would suspect. And too many Nancy Drew mysteries under my belt. Mom just laughed at us and said we were scaredy cats. I never let her know she was right.

Mom had the latest thing in a clothes washer. No more scrubbing on a washboard. Down there in the basement stood an odd sort of contraption with a wringer on it. That wringer could squeeze every drop of water out of the clothes that went through it. I was leary of it and never got too close. I knew if my fingers got caught in that thing, I'd never see them again. But I digress. Once mom had washed the clothes, she lugged them back up two flights of stairs and out onto the back porch where she hung them on the clotheslines to dry.

In the summer, spring, and autumn, it was a no brainer. I could easily figure out how the laundry would dry with weather still so fine. But in winter, when mom had to put on a coat, scarf, and rubber boots to hang the clothes, I often quipped that it seemed a useless endeavor. How could laundry dry in freezing temps, I asked her. She always said the same thing. "It will freeze, but it will dry. It was her mantra and I have lost count of how many times she always followed that up with a stern command. "If you go onto the porch for any reason, DO NOT bend the clothes or you'll break them."

I guess she thought I was stupid. I'd bent, twisted, and rolled a lot of clothes in my short life span and nothing had ever broken. And while I knew mom wasn't given to telling stories, I did think she was mistaken about frozen fabric. I eventually conjured up a whole scenario concerning why she would think such a thing and finally put it back on my grandpa, mom's dad, who loved to tease. I finally decided that it was Pa, which is what we girls called him, who had convinced my mom that frozen fabric was breakable.

Now the thing was, I was just dying to do my own experiment. I so wanted to prove to mom that she'd been hoodwinked. The problem was, the kitchen was open to the dining room and the dining room was open to the door onto the porch and worse yet, there was a window she could see through, all the way from the kitchen. So she'd know if I was out there in the dead of winter, purposely bending the laundry to prove my case. "Ahh, hahh,"  I wanted to say to her, "I bent the clothes and they are just fine."  But I never got the chance. Mom was always in the kitchen cooking or baking or digging out or putting away. I dare not take the chance that she'd see me. Punishment in our house consisted of pain across the backside.

The year I was nine I got my chance to investigate. The snow was high and new fallen, the wind was cold and the day overcast. Surely another snow storm was on the way. As luck would have it, mom decided to head out to the grocery store, just in case we got snowed in for a few days. I saw my chance. Not knowing how soon she'd return, I headed for the back door onto the porch, no jacket, no scarf, no head covering, no boots. Just me in my indoor clothes. Curiosity had gotten the best of me. I just had to know if frozen clothes could break.

It was sheet day. With five of us in the family, and only three clothes lines, mom divided the laundry into increments. That day it was bedding. There they were, a whole gaggle of muslin sheets, hanging on the line like frozen ghosts. And even though there was a cold wind, the sheets didn't move. I reached out and touched one. Yep, it was frozen alright. Stiff as cardboard.

I gave my upcoming experiment considerable thought. I should have done it before braving the horrendous cold in indoor clothes, but my mind hadn't matured enough to have thought through the whole endeavor in great detail. I considered reaching out and bending a whole big chunk of a sheet back onto itself. Then I stopped. What if mom was right and it did break. I'd have to confess because the evidence of tampering would be obvious and there would be no one to blame but one of us kids.

The clothespins we had in those days were the simple wooden ones that rather looked like they had a head and two legs. The spring-type clothespins were off in the future. I carefully pried a clothespin off of the closest sheet, then I took the corner of that sheet and bent it down, rather like turning down the corner of a page in a book so as to mark the place where you left off.

SNAP. I tell you no lie. I heard the threads break. I looked at the sheet and could readily see where the threads were destroyed and I knew that once the sheet defrosted, the corner would likely fall off. I hurriedly put the sheet back on the line and replaced the clothes pin. I was so glad I'd used the corner where the pin was to do my experiment because I was pretty sure mom would think she had done the damage when she took the clothes off the line.

Mom changed the sheets on our twin beds every week. Each time I discovered clean sheets on my bed, I'd pull up the corners to see if  I had a sheet with a missing corner. I never found any. In my haste to get the experiment over with before mom returned from the store that day, I may have bent the corner of a double bed sheet. If that was the case, the evidence  would be on mom and dad's bed. I never went into their room to check for missing corners. Their bedroom was a forbidden place. How would I ever explain my presence there if I got caught, let alone the fact that the sheet corners had all been pulled up.

Those were the days of all cotton. The sheets were cotton as were the towels, the underwear, the socks, and all the dresses--unless you were a grown up. Mom had some pretty dresses she wore when they went dancing. They went somewhere to get clean. I wasn't exactly sure where, but they never got drug down to the basement or hung on the clotheslines. Do I know if clothes made of today's man-made fabrics will break if frozen? No, I don't. I can't test it out either, because ever since I was sixteen, I've lived at sea level in southern California. It doesn't freeze here. I mention this just in case you don't know.

So now that I'm past seventy, I can freely write of my disobedience. The fear of being caught disappeared long ago. But one thing I can vouch for is that when my own kids did something "just to prove a theory", I was more lenient than I might have been had it not been for breaking that sheet so long ago. So just to set the record straight, I can say my experiment proved with great accuracy that frozen fabric can break. I can also attest to the fact that you can hear frozen threads snap. What I cannot say is whether or not the broken fabric falls apart at the damaged spot once it comes to room temperature. I never wanted to ask mom if that had happened. I was curious child. Not a stupid one.

My love to all of you this wonderful season from the little old lady who's decided to come clean.