She talked to the boots. Warning them to come home as soon as it got dark; there were chores to be done.
Susan Shuter | Issue 52
Winter
by Susan Shuter
Winter was like all the other seasons when I was growing up. Best spent outside. It was safer out there. When I came home from school, Mom was usually in the basement. Parked on a wooden stool, her freckled arms quivering as she slammed her iron back and forth across my father’s white shirts. Her face red and sweaty. High blood pressure.
You’re killing your mother, my father would say whenever one of us did something wrong. My much older brother and sister didn’t seem to care. My baby brother didn’t understand.
I’d perch on a high step so that she could just see my legs and dripping boots, their buckles caked with snow. She talked to the boots. Warning them to come home as soon as it got dark; there were chores to be done.
But then the trumpet blare of her radio would interrupt, heralding Queen for a Day, and I’d escape.
Across the street was paradise. An abandoned gravel pit. In winter, its old truck road was better than any roller coaster. The soft drifts on its side hills were for kids whose mothers brought them; the steep snow-packed ramp was for the rest of us.
My toboggan was wooden, a six-seater, bought perhaps with the idea that one day, the whole family would slide down the hill together. But we never did. It was mine, and I had my own rituals.
The first run of the day, I sat upright, my boots tucked under the curved wood, my rope tight in my hands and then, leaning ever so slightly to the left or right, I’d thread my way down.
If the hill felt good, not too fast, not too sluggish, I’d vary my trips. Sometimes kneeling, my hands clutching the knotted rope and the curve of the wood, my face forward, open to the stinging wind. When the snow felt slushy and slow, and the hill was all but deserted, I’d go down lying on my back, searching the blue-violet sky for stars.
When the slush froze up and the ramp turned to ice, something inside made me trudge away. Use the baby hills.
Until one March afternoon. The ramp was hard with ice, but there were bare patches too. Winter was almost finished.
I crouched down low, gripped the toboggan’s side cords, closed my eyes and pushed off. Down once, and then again and again, until my mitts were stiff with cold. One more ride, but this time, I’d stand up, like the big kids.
Within seconds, my toboggan spun sideways, and I was sprawled on the ice. Someone’s mother was bending over me. Asking where I lived. Promising to get my mother.
My shoulder ached and my arm and my side, but I was quite certain nothing was bleeding. I was well-padded, and it was almost dark. My mother had never come looking for me before; I didn’t want her to start now.
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Susan Shuter’s (1948-2026) writing has been published in the Globe & Mail, Dalhousie Review, and Descant.
Read more Susan Stories on SMLTA.
This is gold.
It's an understated heart-wrencher. Unlike you and your aunt, most of us are afraid to lay bare the sensations of childhood in writing. Each detail contains a world, even the perceptions of the changes in snow conditions. This story reminds us that children experience things and keep a particular private knowledge to themselves.