Walking to school

Dad had been injured and was laid up at the University of Utah hospital for a very long time. Since mom wasn't going to leave him for any length of time we stayed at grandma's house in Bountiful, Utah. Since it was during the school year (just after Halloween) mom went and signed us all up for school. My older sister Chelly was in fifth grade, I was in third grade, my younger brother Sam was in first grade and my younger, younger brother was in afternoon kindergarten. The school was about half a mile away from grandma's house so we had to walk to school. The school was an old red brick building multiple stories tall with a huge smokestack on one side of the building. Most of these older buildings were heated using boilers. Boilers are basically what they imply, huge tanks of water are heated to boiling and the steam is then transferred to pipes through the building and into radiators in the individual classrooms. To heat up a room the radiators needed to be opened and then the hot steam would circulate through the pipes. The pipes would get hot and that in turn would heat up the room. I don't think there was any way to actually regulate how hot a room got when the radiators were on it just got hot. The desks in the room closest to the radiators would usually get too hot and the desks furthest away would usually be too cold. I don't think that the middle of the room was any better. The one benefit to a radiator was that when we came in from recess and the cold or snow we could easily dry all of our coats and gloves and hats as they would be hung on top of the radiators. I did not enjoy the school. Chelly did not enjoy school. Sam did not enjoy school. Matthew liked school. For me school was not fun because we had been put into the school in the middle of the year. I was new and everyone else already had friends. I was temporary. Once dad recovered we would go back to our home in Duchesne, Utah. All of this contributed to my lack of desire to do much of anything at school. The teacher tried to be helpful but I was not used to her rules or way of teaching. My family was still trying to get back to a semblance of normality with dad still at the hospital and us living out of suitcases. Grandma's house was always fun to visit but living there was difficult. Visiting dad in the hospital was also difficult. A head injury like my dads had no other visible effects. He had a small bandage on his head but his body functioned like normal he could walk, move his arms and legs, speak and hear us just fine but he could not leave the hospital. He had to stay so that his brain could heal and to make sure there were no other places where blood had pooled after the injury. Dad eventually recovered in every way except for the loss of his sense of smell, that has been gone ever since. It was winter time and Bountiful gets a lot of snow. We would wake up to six or ten or even fourteen inches of snow and sometimes more. Even with all of the snow the schools did not close and we still had to walk. We would leave the house and Chelly would lead the way. We would make a trail out of the front door and across the front yard. We did not try to stay on sidewalks as most were not cleared anyway. We created our own paths as we walked towards the church that was across the street from grandma's house. We went through the parking lot of the church down the street two blocks and turned right. We walked next to a city park for three blocks and turned left and the school was just a half block in on the right hand side of the street. Our jeans would be wet up to our knees, our shoes and socks or our boots and socks would be wet, our gloves would be frozen and we probably looked like Eskimos. We bonded to the snow just as much as we bonded to each other. Every day we got up and walked to school.