The Coonridge Digest: This winter’s been a rascal…

Greetings from the Ridge.

Maybe the most famous cold weather tale concerned the old trapper who came upon a flock of geese frozen into a lake’s frigid surface. He fired his gun, the geese flapped their wings, and the entire lake flew away.

God only knows that this winter’s been a rascal and if it didn’t produce stories enough of its own, it’s surely dredged up memories of tales gone by.

One of my favorites was told every winter by my Grandpa Ralph who said he once had to carry hot water to the outhouse to thaw out the rear of his own grandpa who’d made the mistake of sitting down on an ice-covered hole. Grandpa said it was a no-win situation with Grandpa alternately cussing because he was stuck tight and squalling about the hot water being poured over his bare tailgate.

One of the most exciting events of a Coonridge winter is to hurry down to the coffee shop of a morning to hear the tall tales come in the door. Some of the tale-tellers equal a Nor’ western in their velocity and the object of the game is to out-lie the previous windbag.

This week one fellow said that his wife’s teeth were chatterin’ that morning. "No big deal," he said, "but they were still in the glass." One fella swore he got ice cream out of his cows, another swore that he’d gone coon hunting on the previous evening and had to put jumper cables on his hounds to get them started. Huley Briggs claimed that he’d seen squirrels hurling themselves onto electric fences that very mornin’.

Norm Meier said that he’d come from town and seen a hitchhiker holdin’ up a picture of his thumb and that when his sister went into get new glasses last week, the optician threw in a free ice scraper.

Merle Lovel begins every sentence with, "That’s nothin’," which makes him the general irritation of the coffee table. The saving grace is that Merle has elevated the common lie to an art form and his words are often quoted in local sermons. He leaned back on his chair, took a swig of decaf and said, "That’s nothin’. This mornin’ I tried to open my mail and it broke!" We snickered and that was all the encouragement he needed. "My dad told me that when he was a boy, old Heck Lepper got drunk and went runnin’ around town stark naked. It was twenty below and Heck froze to the sidewalk in front of the library. The town board just slapped a plaque on his butt, called him a Greek statue and left him there ‘til spring."

By this time the bull hockey was getting deeper than the snow outside and you couldn’t find the truth in the cafè with a spyglass. Clyde Grinder said that he once saw his neighbors pushing their house down the street trying to jumpstart the furnace. He said he remembered a winter so cold that the men never shaved their beards – ‘they’d just break off a few inches every week.

Kenny Wayne said that his mother would wrap him and his brother up in so many layers of clothing before school that when his little brother fell down coming home one night, he had to roll him down the hill and into the door.

Women rarely get into these lying matches, but we’ve recently formed our own jabber table and we’re slowly matching the men in our ability to fabricate. Laura Utterford told us that she honestly remembered winters where it was too cold to bathe and her mother would line up

the family and vacuum them down on Saturday nights. She said she once turned on the shower and got hail.

Lois Effaw said she could well remember the day her dad set up an ice-fishing shack in their bathtub, and for breakfast her mother actually served milk by the slice. She said they’d purposely eat at the worst restaurant in town just to get heartburn, and that her uncle once got hooked on vodka during a winter when that was the only liquid that didn’t freeze.

Sarah Schondiest claims that her aunt got sick and had a 104 temperature. The family hauled her out of her sick bed, put her in the middle of the living room and huddled around her for warmth. She said that was the winter that most of the ministers in town stopped preaching about hell. The congregations were beginning to like the idea of the place.

As for me, if I want lies I don’t have to break the car loose and go to the local coffee shop. I’ve got Herb, a man who claims to have once walked to school with a toaster in his pants.

Yea, the winter’s been a rough one, but just think of the lies we can tell.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door if it’s frozen shut.