Snow Angel Mittens
THE WINTER OF 1933. Some remember that time as the depths of the Great Depression. But I remember it for something else.
Life, as we knew it, had ground to a halt in our small town in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. When the bank failed, lots of folks found themselves penniless. Timber and farming drove our economy, and hundreds of men were idled when the sawmills shut down for lack of orders. Most stores were boarded up. Hoboes dropped off freight trains and wandered into town, searching for work or just a meal. Parents never had to mention starving kids overseas to get us to clean our plates, because kids right on our block ate things like library paste, crayons, even soap—and then got violently ill.
All around us was grim reality. Farmers couldn’t sell what they raised or grew, so harvesters and plows lay rusting in farmyards. Stoic, sad-eyed cattle, shrunken for lack of feed, were driven down into big ditches and shot. Ranchers buried them, rather than watch them starve.
But life went on. It wasn’t
