Winters back when . . . .

Well, here’s another one I started and never finished, this was from last winter on a real cold day. Today’s not so cold, but seasonal, and some snow on the ground.
Everybody has been whining about winter and the weather. I keep saying it’s just that we have had a few easy winters and this is more like what it used to be.
Some winters I remember:
here would be one ‘big’ storm, at least, every year, where there’d be 1 ½ to 2 feet of snow, instead of the under 1 foot from the usual storms. After one of these, I guess I was about 14, so it would have been about 1957 or so, we had a storm that snowed and blew so much that the road coming up to our farm, which had high banks on each side, was completely blocked in about 4 to 5 feet deep. My father was away and the neighbor was helping us with milking the cows, we loaded the cans of milk to go to the diary in Hudson, and the car could not even get out of the driveway - and carrying the cans back to the milk house we managed to drop one and spill it - my father kept asking why the dogs were always licking the snow in that one spot but we just said 'I dunno!"
Many times the temperature going well below 0 – 10 or more below. We always had to keep the water running in the house and barn so the pipes did not freeze. I still have to do that!
Again when I was in high school, one winter the ice was thick enough to skate on by a little bit before Thanksgiving, and we were able to skate right up until sometime in March. And when I lived in Utica while going to college, it snowed every day from Thanksgiving to Easter, not a lot some days, but every single day there was at least a little fluffy of snow.
One year we had so much snow that my father could not get the tractor and manure spreader into the fields, so he just kept spreading it on my mother’s garden – boy did we have some vegetables that summer!
Having a couple of feet of snow on the ground used to be the norm, and we thought nothing of it. I have a photo of Sara as a toddler, in a bright print jacket, climbing over a huge snowbank in front of the trailer we lived in then, over in back of my folk’s house on our old farm.
Our farm was on top of a big hill, with more hills behind the house and barns, so we had plenty of places to go sledding. We could use the road, and with the packed snow on it you could really fly – there was a longer hill and a little flat space and a shorter hill and the goal was to be going fast enough to get down them both. It was a longer walk back up but what a ride! At night it was so neat – there was very little traffic and the neighbors would know that we might be sledding so we’d be watching out for each other. Once there was a crust on the snow, and I went sliding on top of it in the neighbor’s field on the other side of the road. Sliding until the runners broke through the crust, and the sled stopped but I didn’t and my face hit that crust – ye-ouch!
I’m sure I’ll remember more as soon as I post this, but that’s a few. Does this count for the ‘memory a day’ that I started last year and of course fell short of. Let’s call it that.