No Fun

Those were cold, grey days growing up in Middle Haddam. Clouds promised snow but rarely produced enough to be useful. Somewhere in the back of an imagined scrapbook the snow reaches to the window panes but in reality we kids were lucky to see a foot and that didn’t last. Only the grey lasted all winter, through March and into April. Yet there was nary a new leaf on the big maples until well past my birthday in early May, when Mom was not quite ready to put away winter coats.

There was nothing to do because it was December. The snowman melted. After a terrific fight with the neighbor kids we obliterated the snowfort. There were some hard feelings with the only likely playmate, next-door Chris, a year older. He had surprisingly good aim for a kid who didn’t play baseball and he packed a nasty ice ball. Never mind I had thrown first yesterday, ice balls were cheating. Now there was nothing to do on a cold, gloomy afternoon.

“Go play outside. Get some fresh air. Go sliding. Did you wax Daddy’s skis?”

His old hickory skis were way too long and heavy for me to actually ski and they stuck to everything. Not only that, the gentle slope behind our barn was only a few hundred feet long and ended in trees so even if you could get going, you’d have to fall down to stop before you tangled up in the brush.

You never got enough snow in Middle Haddam. Not really good, deep snow. Our sled runners had worn right down to the grass and rocks the day before. Besides, skiing or sliding by myself was No Fun, that dismal category of existence that dogged my childhood.

No Fun. The afternoon stretched into eternity. My mittens were wet and so were the linings of my five-buckle galoshes. Rexie lay curled comfortably against the living room couch, his eyes shut tight.

“Wanna go outside?” I whooped at him but he only fluttered his tail politely against the floor.

“Mom, it’s starting to rain,” I whined.

“No, it’s not. Run along now. See if Chris is home.”

“They’ve gone to the Ice Capades,” I muttered. They went every year and didn’t take me again this year because I had done something horrible such as breaking a window accidently on purpose. Or they were going on to visit cousins in West Hartford. Such a happy, jolly family piling into their back Ford sedan, the three big kids in back, baby Alice in front between David and Henny.

We never went anywhere every year. My family was No Fun. And I was all alone on a dismal day.

“Where’s Tink?” I asked, again. My best friend, my age, who didn’t throw ice balls, lived in the next town.

“She and Maggie went shopping. Why don’t you go ride your horse?”

I pulled on my cold boots and mittens and let the storm door slam as hard as it would. There at the end of the driveway stood our old white-painted barn, two stories tall, wide enough for both cars and a workbench alongside one. I pushed one heavy sliding door open enough to squeeze through into the dank gloom. It smelled of motor oil and old, raw wood, an acrid, pissy smell.

Dad’s tools lay on a gouged-out plank counter among cans of paint thinner and glue, clamps and screwdrivers, signs of his household projects, perhaps tacking a painting into a frame or fixing a lamp. I glanced at the long-necked oil can and a screw-top copper mister of Flit bug killer, paint brushes, cobwebs, signs of long-gone summer, absolutely nothing of any relevance to me there. The lawnmowers, one power, one push, rested at the end of the bench.

Dust lay on every object, testimony to it’s disuse. Beyond the lawnmowers, at the very back of the barn, just past the front bumper of Mom’s car, a stair led up to the second floor.

There was nothing of any interest to me up there, only old oil paintings and trunks of Spanish shawls and ivory combs, old letters and journals. Stuff my dead aunt Edith had brought back. We kids wrapped ourselves in those black and gold shawls with long, long fringe and tried to stick the big combs into our girlish hair but they fell right out. Such long teeth on those combs and the fancy lace carving. Some were translucent, some light and brown. No one ever asked us to even be careful. One day that would all disappear.

In summer, bright sunlight pierced the siding and the little windows of the high cupola and brightened the dark matched-boards of the walls and ceiling. And it illuminated the bodies of dying wasps littering the old, rough plank floorboards. Overhead thickets of slow-flying wasps with long, dangling legs dipped and swooped too close as they came and went from their nests in the cupola.

There was one place in the barn I liked from the first moment I let myself believe it was what it seemed. What I longed for. Beyond the lawnmower, under the space of the stairs an old horse stall remained, about five feet wide and eight feet long, just the right size for a real horse. My parents always adamantly refused to let me have a horse and it was a constant battle between us.

As a sop to my obsession and no doubt at my mother’s insistence, Dad set a barrel on home-made sawhorses in that stall, screwed a plywood neck and two-dimensional head on that. Clothesline reins dangled from a notch in this head that faced out through the heavy sliding doors. I stepped up onto the milk box and swung my leg over this doll-horse’s dusty barrel and settled myself on it’s horribly bulging, slippery shape. Try as I might, this was no live horse. I clucked and kicked my heels against the air, feeling like a fool.

Nothing happened, of course, except I had a higher view into the front seat of my mother’s car just a few feet away. So many obstacles. A terrible sadness filled me, a certain knowledge that I would never feel a live creature under me, that I would never put my hand on a warm neck, that no powerful body would gather itself to take me out of the barn and into sunny fields. Beyond, into my real life.

No, that December afternoon would last forever, all dust and darkness.

Then my mother’s voice called me from the back door, high and sweet.

“Reedie? Come on in and get cleaned up. We’re going over to Maggie’s for dinner.”

It wasn’t always No Fun. Inside my boots eventually dried. The neighbors came back and eventually it snowed enough to ski down that hill and in just a few years when I had my own barn my mother gave me $250 to buy a real horse I could sit on in his stall when the December sleet sifted down and as long as I can help it there will always be a real horse. Fun!