[ponyakr]

this story is about the strangest street scene i've ever witnessed & the events that surrounded it. i have a pic of me at about age 3 out playing in the snow beside a pitiful little snowman. but i was to young to remember it. the 1st snow i remember was in feb of either '61 or '62. it was on a friday afternoon. me & a helper were doing our afternoon milking, which i did everyday after school. as we looked out the window of the barn to the west we could see these tiny flakes of snow falling. but soon they turned to giant flakes. they were the only flakes i remember seeing up until this time. & at least in my mind, by far, the biggest i've seen til this very day. anyhow, it snowed long & hard (about 12"), definately the most i've seen til now. T.J. says thats the way she remembers it too. then it got really cold, maybe 12-14 degrees. now i know that may not seem cold to you folks in the north, but here, most winters, it never gets below 20 degrees & doesn't stay that way long enuff to freeze the ground. but that year it did. for several days it never got above freezing even in the daytime. all the ponds even froze over. most traffic ground to a halt (not our milk trucks tho, the milk must get thru). the vacuum lines in our milkin barn froze up & even the milking machines themselves froze. it was a nitemare. after 4 or 5 days of this my dad finally had all he could take. he sold the cows & a big 18 wheeler came & picked them up in a big cattle trailer & hauled them away. he was sad because he loved cows & farming. but i was glad. that meant i didn't have to get up at 3am to milk anymore & i didn't have to milk after school any more. i was free at last. our family had never taken a vacation. we were tied to the dairy farm every day. but now that we were free from that, my dad decided to treet us to a family vacation. he probably did it partly out of guilt, 'cause he was a homebody, who didn't even like to eat out. now this turned out to be our only vacation ever, but it was 1 to remember. dad had been stationed for a while during ww2 in colorada. so he knew how nice it was up there, especially in the summer. so we loaded up in our '61 ford, 6 cly, 3 on the tree & headed north. to save $ mom packed plenty of sandwich makin stuff, so when we got to the foothills of the rockies, we pulled over to a roadside picnic table & she started makin sandwiches. but before we could dig in the bread was crusty like toast. it was my 1st experience with low humidity. but , i'd soon see more of its effects.