(Originally published on my blog, “Blank Canvas” for Lawrence.com on March 10, 2006)
I've been waiting since January to write a little winter themed deal about where my friends and I used to go sledding as kids. But winter has fizzled out and my attention has turned towards planting seeds for the spring garden. This week I've been bringing trays of broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower, and kale starts outside to get a taste of what wind and squirrels are like, before transplanting them in early April. Maybe it's because I was raised in a place where gardening was next to impossible, but growing vegetables from seed to fruit still captivates me like a magician changing an egg into a live dove with a wave of his wand. In both cases, I have an idea of how the tricks are done, but I love them just the same.
I remember my mom trying to grow some beans outside our apartment window in Evanston, Illinois. They survived in the sun starved shadows and had just begun to develop skinny little inch-long fingers that I recognized as beans, when they were unceremoniously killed by the building super who had the all the apartment's window frames (and our bean plants) spray-painted battleship gray. As much as the blooming of the first daffodils around town lifts my spirits, I wish it had wintered more. I don't feel I've fully hibernated yet, and the bugs are bound to be hellacious due to the mildness. It's also been the first year, I can recall, that I haven't gone sledding even once.
When I was growing up in Evanston, we used to sled on a snow-covered hill of garbage called "Mt. Trashmore." The hill was owned by the city and was part of a big park where I played baseball in the summer. Rising on the horizon like a pregnant pimple, the 'mountain' was really just a bump with a staircase cut into it made out of railroad ties and one tow-rope for the kids who wanted to try out their new skis before they hit the big slopes in Wisconsin -- or if they were really lucky -- in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Although Trashmore was probably no more than 50 feet tall from its base to its rounded peak, it did have a nasty vertical drop that gave us kids a five second moment of glorious, out of control terror. The only drawback to the hill, as a winter resort, was that snow always seemed to melt twice as fast on its face compared to anywhere else. We couldn't figure it out back then, why all over town snow piled up in sub-zero weather, but Trashmore always turned to slush in a day or two.
Years later, a friend I grew up with told me that the pipes conspicuously poking out of the unused southern face, of our town's only mountain, were there to release warm gases from decades worth of disposable diapers, orange peels, used condoms, and other good stuff. On my last trip north to visit my dad in Evanston, I found the bedraggled old hill out of commission. 'No Trespassing' and 'Keep Out' signs littered the barren slopes, and there wasn't even a hint of snow. There were, however, people working in the community garden adjacent to the mountain. Incredibly, it looked like many gardeners had been able to grow a few greens and such through the winter. I don't know if all this muddy spring-winter weather is due to global warming or what, but the winters I recall along the Lake Michigan shore were full of ice floes, snow, and wind chills that froze spit before it hit the ground, and I miss them.