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were boiling on the stove. All this took
time. Dr. Walker got off the train at Kendal Green at one
o'clock, and it was after eight in the
evening before everything was ready for the operation. Fortunately there
was no electrical failure and the surgery pro-ceeded smoothly.
Dr. Walker spent the night, and next morning, satisfied with
results left for the long trek back to Boston and turned his patient
over to Dr. Van Nuys.
Today all this snow could be taken care of in a day or two, but not
in 1920 when the town's plowing equipment was very limited. Even on the
Main Road there was enough snow cover for us to get to the station by
sleigh during our forty-two motorless days.
I remember other big snowstorms as a child, when sheets were hung
around my bed like a tent to protect me from drafts and
from snow seeping in through an open window. My window
was always open at night because my mother believed that fresh country
air was healthy, no matter how cold, and she would
sneak around the house in the evening, opening windows in the children's
rooms that my father had sneaked around and closed earlier. All of which
reminds me of an incident that happened many years later
when a young salesman stopped at the house and tried
to talk my father into having the walls and roof insu- lated. He
practically guaranteed that by doing so, the heating
bill would be reduced by one-third. My father listened patiently
to the sales talk, then said that he knew how to cut the heating
bill in half at practically no cost.
"How would you do it?" the salesman asked, and my father replied,
"By nailing the windows down in the wintertime so my wife
can't open them." |
