There was a glitch with Nahanni's post yesterday, but we think we've corrected the problem. Let me know if you aren't seeing seven photos, or if some empty "blocks" show up.

Fred and I walked up to the Plain yesterday. Going to the school house on the Plain is about the same distance as when we walk from our house to our camp at Barre Avenue.

It's always nostalgic for me to go there and see the farm where I grew up, the house we lived in and the school I spent my first years in. Some of the neighboring houses are gone, replaced with new, or decaying, but the memories are still vivid as I look across the fields on either side of "the flat". The hills don't seem as steep behind the farm, and even "Pinkham Hill," the steep incline from Brickett's Crossing Road to the school seems less intimidating than when we went roaring down on a big traverse sled. On good nights (we always went at night because there was no traffic then) when we were able to make the corner without the sled swiping the snowbank or going off the road completely and dumping us, screaming, into the snow, we would go as far as the big field were the horses pastured now. It was a long haul back up Pinkham Hill and it seemed very steep even though there were six or eight of us to share pulling the sled back up. We would take only two or three runs before it would be time to head home in the crisp, cold moonlighted night. It was magical, and we never tired of it. Back then the roads weren't sanded as they are now. Drivers put on their chains when it got too icy, and other than that, everyone knew where they had to step on it to make the hills, just how much speed would be tolerated going around the curves before sliding off the road, and nobody left home without their chains a shovel and often a pail of sand in the car, just in case. So very often sliding conditions were perfect for us kids, and since there were few cars on the road even in the daytime, we weren't in much danger on those nights.

There would be a big gang of us, sometimes more than the traverse sled would hold so there would be individual sleds for kids to go "belly-bump" on, or sometimes fit two on if the sled was big enough. There would be the Gambles, the Maynards, sometimes the Stone kids would come over, always the Barnett kids who lived at the bottom of the hill, the Desmarais kids who lived in the stone house that used to be next door to the school, once in a while our teacher would join us, and sometimes older kids no longer in school. We got lots of exercise and had tons of fun.

The pictures above were taken yesterday on our walk. The Plain, the horses in the big field, and the brook that runs beside Pinkham Hill. Today it's snowing steadily. Everything is beginning to look normal for mid-January. Perhaps I'll go sliding tonight.