On Snowy Nights

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Jim Petersen penned this remembrance of his father 25 years ago...

On snowy nights back in the Forties my father often took me for sleigh rides after dinner. He seemed ten feet tall back then, trudging out ahead of me in the darkness, his gloved hand reaching back to grip my sled’s towrope.

More than 70 years have come and gone since our last ride, but I can still see him there, and I can still hear my sled runners gliding quietly over new fallen snow.

He would pull me down the middle of Mission Avenue, past the Parks, the Bottinellis, the Corbells, Montee's neighborhood grocery store and the Brainards, all the way to Mrs. Fattu’s house at the end of the block.

Christmas lights strung on eves and down porch railings cast red, green, yellow blue and white shadows across snowy yards and leafless tree branches glistened in the darkness.

It was so quiet you could hear snow falling through the still night air. Snowbanks along shoveled walks that to a small boy seemed like mountains muffled the sounds of passing cars.

Approaching headlights became retreating taillights, then silence again, broken only by the sound of sled runners, and the steady cadence of my father’s stride.   

I suppose there were other dads out there clutching towropes in the silent darkness, but I do not see them in my mind’s eye – only my father, me, and my American Flyer.

Now both are gone: first my sled, sometime in the Fifties, and then, too soon thereafter, my father. As gently as new falling snow, he slipped from me into the Darkness on a December night in 1986. And now only memory connects us, and it is I who reaches back for him.