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The question was posed to me recently on whether or not the Halloween of 1991 was as bad as we remember.

Being a man of some years, I can say that yes … I believe it was. I don’t remember every nuisanced part of the blizzard other than to say I got a free day out of it by the time it was all said and done.

Actually a lot of people got a free day out of it, though I suspect Duluth, who got the most from a storm that actually stretched over Oct. 31 to Nov. 3. By the time it was all said and done, Duluth got just over 36 inches of snow.

By comparison, my neck of the prairie received somewhere between 8 and 20 inches and you all over here in Mower received a little less in the 4-10 inch range. I don’t remember exactly the amount of snow because I really didn’t worry about things like that in those days.

In my mind, the snow was falling, the phone call came to the house (no internet in those days so these types of things like school cancellations came through a phone tree set-up) and I was free of school.

It’s the only time that phone calls that early in the morning were welcome. The phone rang, my mom or dad would answer the phone and I would lay there smugly knowing that me and the cat had another couple hours to sleep.

I would pay for it later in the afternoon when I had to trudge down to the barn to help take care of our horse, but that morning required nothing so strenuous as falling deeper into the blankets and listening serenely to the cat’s purrs.

What I do remember though was still pretty wild as storms go. The storm kept coming and the snow continued to fall as it piled and piled and piled in the yard. I’m not entirely sure when the snow came to an end for us, just that there was a lot of it left over by the time it was said and done.

Good fort-making snow too. Had I still been of a mind, I would have wandered over to the back of Gene’s Service where Gene would pile all of his snow from each storm.

Snow forts were kind of my jam earlier in my youth and when the snow fell in bundles like it did that night, me and my cadre of friends would build staggering monuments to kiddom. Not just snow forts, but snow bastions. One year, our fort was so complicated that we had tunnels like anthills running the course of the U-shaped piles of snow, which provided us a courtyard in the middle.

We had ramparts, large suites, places for candles and even a small sledding hill down the middle of this particular fort. It was magnificent if not completely safe, but in our minds we were pros by this point in lives and expected to be hired out by kids in neighboring communities to build their own forts.

By the time of the ‘91 storm, maturity or at least a certain level of maturity, kept me from such childish acts. Instead, I’m sure I stayed inside to play the Nintendo until it was time to take care of the horse or help with shoveling.

Or at least I think I helped. The public record may prove otherwise. That I continued to remain inside that day doing very little of everything, though if I know my parents it’s highly doubtful they let that outcome come to fruition. Heck they might even have made me do homework, which at the time seemed unnatural. We didn’t have portals to log in or some such nonsense.

Rather, I had two parents who were teachers and if I made too big of a deal about it, they could easily get me to the school if they wanted to risk the drive to get me homework. In such circumstances I always tried sliding in under the radar.

Work smarter, not harder as the saying goes.

Regardless, not a whole lot must have happened during that storm personally, because I remember so very little of it. It must have passed quietly for me with memories based on assumptions.

What I’m sure I did do was celebrate the snow for it was because I’m weird and all of you readers should know by now that I have a penchant for winter rather than the rest of the silly seasons that come with heat, bugs and humidity.

Kind of like this year’s Halloween, and while it didn’t come with the snow of 1991, it came with the fondness for wishing I could snuggle back into the blankets and waste the day away with warm cat or two.

You know, being an adult is just no fun.