As we drove along the soil route North of our farm 1 Sunday afternoon, the colour of the sky reminded me of Mom's Ag pick and refined sugar waiters when they were tarnished and needed to be polished again.

Since morning, the sky had been cloudy, but now at mid-afternoon, the clouds had grown much thicker and darker. Earlier in December we had gotten a small snow. Respective forty-degree years had melted most of it, and the landscape was a combination of dun-colored grass, black tree subdivisions and the russet colour of certain oak leaves.

Every twelvemonth in December, Dad and I went on a Christmastide tree expedition, and we were on our manner now over to what we called our 'other place' to cut a tree. During the summer, I made frequent trips to the other place, a 2nd farm my parents owned that was about a statute mile away, to assist Dad with the haying or just to label along when he checked on the maize or the oats or the soybeans.

But after school started, I rarely went to the other place, and it always took me by surprise how different it looked in the winter. Instead of greenish lucerne and herd's grass and trefoil waving in a warm South breeze, what had grown back after 3rd harvest was now brownish chaff that trembled in the face of a North wind. The Fields were strangely soundless now, too, without the songs of meadowlarks and bobolinks, and the bobwhite quail quail which lived in the narrow subdivision of forest lining the road.

We were only about five proceedings into our journeying when Dad shifted the pickup motortruck truck down into first gear wheel and then eased into the field driveway. The rutted path that ran along the border of the meadow was so jarring that a merry jingling came from the baseball glove compartment -- probably a few thunderbolts and washers, along with a couple of twists and maybe a screwdriver or two. When you're a farmer, you never cognize when you might necessitate a twist or a screwdriver or a bolt.

"Is it going to snow, Daddy?" I asked. Now that we had gotten past the trees lining the road, the sky had opened in presence of us again.

Dad leaned forward to look up through the windshield.

"I'd state there's a pretty good chance," he replied.

"How much?"

My male parent shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe quite a bit. Wind's out of the east. And that usually intends we’ll acquire at least adequate to shovel. Could be a batch more, though."

When we reached the long plantation at the other end of the field, Dad turned the motortruck around, driving forward a few feet then backing up, then driving forward and then back again, forward and back, until we were facing in the way we had come. He allow the engine idle for a few secs before shutting it off.

"Daddy?" I said, as we started walking toward the rows of planted reddish pine. "When make you believe it will start to snow?"

Dad stopped and tipped his caput back. "Soon," he said, "that wind experiences natural and damp."

When my male parent said 'soon,' I was not expecting it to start snowing within the adjacent 10 minutes. At first, while we were cutting the tree we had selected, only a few random snowflakes drifted to the ground. By the time we reached the motortruck and had securely stowed our Christmastide tree in the back, it was already snowing harder.

"If it maintains up like this all night, you won't have got school tomorrow," Dad said as he started the truck. He slowly allow out the clutch, and soon we were retracing our path along the field driveway. He turned on the windshield wipers, and with each base on balls -- clickety-snick, clickety-snick -- the wipers cleared an discharge through the wet snowflakes plastered to the glass.

After we had pulled onto the soil road, Dad shifted into 2nd gear, although when we reached the 'Y' -- where you could either turn left to travel toward our farm, or right to travel toward the house that had at one time been portion of our other place -- he shifted into first gear wheel wheel again.

"Hope we do it up the hill," he said, glancing at me. "Wet snowfall do the route sort of slick."

It was touching and travel for a few secs when the dorsum wheels started spinning, but finally we reached the point where the hill leveled off. Trees grew on both sides of the route here, and to the right, a steep depository financial institution gave rise to a little wooded hillside.

"Look," Dad said, pointing toward the bank. He inched over to the side of the route and stopped.

I peered through the drape of falling snow. The depository financial institution looked pretty much the same as it always had -- exposed tree roots, musca volitans of moss and bare spots where level sandstone stones had slid toward the road.

"What make you see?" I asked.

"Wintergreen," Dad answered. He close off the motortruck and opened the door.

Wintergreen?

The first time I had tasted wintergreen, I decided that it was my favourite flavor. Peppermint was a small too sharp, although candy canes at Christmastide were all right. Spearmint didn't savor like much of anything. Wintergreen, it seemed to me, was just right. In my opinion, Teaberry chewing gum was the best, with wintergreen Lifesavers following as a stopping point second.

Dad liked wintergreen too. Lifeguard books were popular gift exchanges at school for our Christmastide party, and if the individual who had drawn my name gave me a Lifeguard book, I would merchandise with other children who had also gotten books. Sometimes I managed to get respective other axial rotations of wintergreen. Then I would share them with Dad. I thought Teaberry chewing gum was better than candy because the taste sensation lasted longer, but Dad preferred Lifesavers. Gum, he said, stuck to his dentures.

During the summer, every time I went to town with Dad to crunch feed, I hoped he would purchase a bundle of my favourite candy or gum. Not at the provender mill, of course. They didn't sell Teaberry chewing gum or Lifesavers at the provender mill. But if we went to the eating house for pie while we waited for our feed, or if Ma had asked Dad to pick up a couple of things at the grocery shop store, I would seek to speak him into purchasing some chewing chewing gum or candy.

Going to the provender factory with Dad was a summertime activity, however, and there were long stretch alongs during the school twelvemonth when I never even saw a bundle of Teaberry gum or a axial rotation of Lifesavers, much less had any in my possession.

So what was Dad talking about when he had stopped the motortruck and said, "wintergreen?"

I stared at the embankment and then at the hill beyond but I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. I close the motortruck door behind me just as Dad scrambled nimbly up the depository financial institution into the woods.

"It's growing all over here," he said, pointing to the ground. "They've got berries, too."

I struggled up the depository financial institution behind him to acquire a near look. Underfoot were little works with glistening greenness leaves.

"That greenish material is wintergreen?" I said.

My male parent nodded.

"Like what they utilize to do gum?"

"Yup. Here. Taste."

He reached down and picked a couple of small, pinkish-red berries, popping 1 into his oral cavity and handing one to me.

I sniffed the berry. It smelled like wintergreen, all right, but I wasn’t 1 spot certain about eating the thing.

"Taste it," Dad urged. "You'll be surprised."

So, I ate the berry. It had a unusual consistence -- kind of dry and mushy, all at the same time. .and then my oral cavity was filled with the fantastic taste sensation of wintergreen. The same as my favourite gum, but different, too. More delicate.

"It's good!" I exclaimed, grinning. Then I frowned. "How come up we haven't seen it before?"

"Usually too much snowfall by this time," Dad said.

"What about in the summer, though?"

"Too much undergrowth and other greenness things."

"And this is really the material they utilize in gum?" I asked.

Dad took his cap off, slapped it against his leg to free it of snowfall and then set it back on his head.

"Well. .they probably don't travel into the forest and pick wild wintergreen. People probably raise it and sell it, and I believe they might utilize the go forths of absence rather than the berries, but yes, this is the stuff."

By now the snowfall was falling so difficult it made a hissing noise as it struck the copper-colored oak leaves above us. Unlike other trees, some of the oaks, I had noticed, maintain their leaves of absence until spring.

"How make you cognize so much about wintergreen?" I asked.

"Oh," Dad said, "when we were kids, we used to pick it so we could do water ice cream."

I turned to look at him. "Ice cream?"

"Our sort of water ice cream, anyway. A small dish of snowfall with winter-green berries amalgamated in."

Suddenly I struck upon a fantastic idea.

"I know! I can seek some right now."

I took off my mitten, picked a few wintergreen berries and scooped a little smattering of fluffy, fresh snow. I set the berries in the snow, and -- well -- I have got to acknowledge it was pretty tasty.

I set my mittens back on. "Didn't you have got existent water ice pick when you were growing up, Dad?"

My male parent smiled. "Sure -- sometimes. Not hive away bought, though. We made our ain with a hand-cranked water ice pick freezer. But that was mostly in the summertime. We thought wintergreen water ice pick was an atrocious batch of fun."

Dad had been the center kid among respective aged brothers, an aged sister, and three little sisters. My grandparents had worked as cooks in a timber encampment in northern Wisconsin River in the early 1900s. Many old age ago, long before I was born, Dad had made his life film editing mush wood.

"Daddy? How did you see the wintergreen from the road?" I asked.

My male parent hesitated before answering. "I didn't see it. Not today, at least."

I stopped trying to set my mittens so the pollex lined up like it was supposed to and turned my full attending toward Dad.

"Remember last fall, when the county Forester came out here?" he asked.

"Yeah, I remember."

Just on the other side of the little wooded hill was a two-acre base of tall redness long with a couple of rows of achromatic long adjacent to the road. Dad said the trees were among the oldest of the plantations in the county that had been planted just after the Great Depression to maintain the sandy dirt from eroding. Nearly every year, the Forester would come up out to check up on on them. One twelvemonth he used Dad's long trees to show a trade name new trimming device to Foresters from other counties.

Well," Dad continued, "while we were out here, I decided to take a small walk. I don't acquire much of a opportunity just to walk around back here."

"And that's when you saw the wintergreen?"

Dad nodded. "I was waiting for the right chance to demo it to you."

He turned back toward the truck. "It'll be dark soon. We'd better acquire home. The cattle are waiting to be milked."

As we slid down the embankment, I glanced over my shoulder.

Wintergreen.

Growing in the forest not far from my house.

And in that instant, I knew chewing gum and candy would never again savor quite the same.

From the book: Christmastide In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin River Farm)
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