Coonridge Digest: Tall tales abound ’bout what’s really cold

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

Cold weather is bad enough at my age, but the only thing that’s worse that sufferin’ the chill up your stockings when you step out onto the front stoop every morning, is sufferin’ through your friends’ tales of how cold it used to get.

To hear some people talk, the world must indeed be a much kinder and gentler place than it used to be. No matter how hot, how cold, how generally miserable life gets, there’s always somebody who can top the current situation with their own, more horrible tale of misery and heartache. Like I really need that.

I grew up at the knee of a Grandpa with only three fingers on his right hand. He claimed to the day he died (not of frostbite) that the fingers fell off one day in the cold. Grandpa said he was out cuttin’ wood. In those days they’d power a big saw by stretchin’ a belt from the pully of a tractor to the gears of a buzz saw. Grandpa swears that sometime durin’ an especially cold mornin’ he knocked his gloved hand against the saw and never thought a thing about it until he came in for lunch, took of his glove, and shook two fingers onto the dinner plate. Said he never felt a thing and for years it was a favorite after supper expedition to crawl up on his lap and say, "Grandpa, show us the fingers you ain’t got."

We never doubted Grandpa. Even when he told us we could trace our family tree all the way back to two New England settlers who were hanged as horse thieves so the family tree ended there.

Aunt Betty was once a fishin’ and huntin’ guide in Canada before she moved to the Midwest. She said that she once had to pry a very large New Jersey banker off the seat of an outdoor toilet one frosty mornin’. Betty was a wiry little lady who could easily whip her weight in badgers or insurance salesmen. She tried pullin’ on the generously proportioned fisherman, then pryin’ with the handle of a skillet, and she finally resorted to pourin’ warm water onto the fella’s ample underpinnings. Flummoxed and runnin’ short of time, Betty grabbed an ice chisel and took to chippin’ away at the furniture, careful not to puncture the inhabitant. She claimed that the bulbous banker took a little part of his vacation home with him.

Of course we’ve all had at least one windy kinsman tell us about the duck/geese/pigeons who landed on a pond/creek/lake, then somebody shot a gun/cannon/firecracker and the entire body of water took off toward the sky/ heaven/Missouri. At least in our family the way to judge the truth of a story is the frequency with which it’s told. Really accomplished liars allow as how repeated tellings eventually make a story true when in fact, the opposite is true. Once Uncle Harry tells the story of day the snow froze in the sky for the twenty-fourth time, you know it’s a lie.

Miss Guthrie down at Coonridge Elementary teaches a little course in Tall Tales. Sadly, today’s youth have little of the knowledge and experience to help them understand some of these cold weather whoppers. She said she told them about the winter in the 1820’s when you could walk all the way from Coonridge to the county seat without ever climbin’ a fence, just walkin’ over the top of ‘em. The kids sat there with blank stares wonderin’ why somebody didn’t just back their SUV out of the garage and go to Walmart instead. She read ‘em tales of prairie women spendin’ the entire day tryin’ to melt enough snow to cook with. One little girl asked why she didn’t just put it in the microwave or run down to the Jiffy Stop for some bottled Perrier.

That’s when Guthrie got a brainstorm and laid the biggest whopper on ‘em. She said, "I can remember back when I was girl, it got so cold one night that they cancelled the basketball game!" The room was silent. Jaws were heard droppin’ in the back of the room. The kids simply could not believe that people could go a whole night without this basic necessity of life. One little gal started sobbin’ to think of the hardship that her ancestors had to endure. "But what did they do, Miss Guthrie? How did they survive?"

"It was tough, but they made it," said the teacher. "For an entire evening the families sat around and talked to each other."

Miss Guthrie said that it was a moment that drew her class together in a common bond of sympathy for the sufferin’s that made this nation great.

An epiphany, she called it.

Throw on another quilt and enjoy this weather while we’ve got it. Before long we’ll wish we had this weather back again as we listen to tall tales of "I can remember when it got so hot…"

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.