I’ll have mine iced

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 2:47 PM MST

Kids’ thermostats are a mystery to me. Right when you think you know such basics as when they are hot and when they are cold, they fool you.

On a windy, windy cold day recently, I huddled in the car out of the gusts and flying dust while two pre-teen girls spent hours riding a horse on what must be the windiest hill in Natrona County, maybe in the entire Rocky Mountain region.

Safely sitting on my heated seat in the car, I realized that it’s not too often that you’re grateful just to be out of the wind, when you can stop worrying about all the other needs and wants you might have in favor of just savoring shelter.

I hardly could push the door open against the gales to get out and ask how they were before ducking back inside to continue reading my book.

“We’re fine,” they chirped from raw, chapped lips on their wind-burned faces, and rode away to have a picnic, of all things.

Finally, I climbed out of the car again and asked if they’d like to stop for cocoa on the way home. It was really a ploy to plant the concept of going home in their heads, but they jumped on the idea like dachshunds that haven’t been fed for an entire day.

Once in the car and out of the wind, they observed that they could taste grit in their mouths from all the flying dirt.

But when it came time to order that nice, hot reviving hot chocolate, they both asked for iced drinks -- one a strawberry crème Frappuccino and the other iced pumpkin spice.

It was hard to watch them munching on ice without going into a state of involuntary shivering myself, but they have that inner furnace that keeps kids racing up and down soccer fields in Casper’s unpredictable sports weather with hardly a complaint.

That soccer season actually does have a few things you can count on. At some point in the fall, the teams will definitely be playing on snow and in the spring, they will alternate between snow and rain days.

Of course, their parents sipping coffee on the sidelines are wrapped in blankets and parkas, watching their offspring in shorts and T-shirts.

Back in time

I now have a better understanding of a story my parents told from my own childhood in another sometimes bitterly cold place, Pittsburgh.

Walking the hilly mile to school every day of grade school was the norm in that safer time, when most families had one car and it took the dad to work.

My mother described anxiously watching for me one day when it was minus 10 degrees, and I was later than usual. She had called the neighbor and they were drinking coffee together, watching for the kids to arrive.

When we came up the icy sidewalk with blue lips, not from the cold but from the ice cream cones we were eating, they discovered what I just learned n the best way to warm up children is to give them ice, as long as it’s teamed with large amounts of sugar and cream.

Then have a very hot drink for yourself.

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