The blue snowsuit--symbol of cultural differences

My family wasn't a travelling one. I only half joke that my mother believed if you went more than two towns away you fell of the edge of the world. She had everything she needed in town, she said, including the country club.

However, when I was six, I left Mrs. Weagle's first grade class and the two-generation family home to travel to Bluefield, West Virginia where my dad operated an Underwood typewriter franchise.

I have many memories. We rented a house on a steep hill, so steep that our first floor window looked into the second floor window of the house next door. It was the same for them. Their first floor window looked into the second floor window of the next house down the street. Our house had an apartment rented by Sheetsie, a nurse, who was invaluable when my mother took a long time to recover from my brother's birth.

We later bought a house on one of the few flat streets in the city.

My mother didn't think the southern schools were academic enough thus I was sent to a private school, Miss Blanche Miller's. I was one of five pupils run by a stereotypical spinster. We were reading, doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in first grade. Handwriting was just that, no sissy printing. And a wrong answer earned a ruler on the knuckles. In that year I completed the same work as I would have in three years in Reading.

We only went three hours a day and we did have a 15 minute play break. I remember the monkey bars with sheer hatred. The object was to hang on and swing from rung to rung. I cried as I did it, but Miss Blanche would never let me drop off nor could I go to the swings until I finished the rungs.

My grandmother was always concerned with warmth. Knee socks were worn until May, a long-sleeved undershirt as well.

She would put me out to play in my blue snowsuit, not like the one in the photo except for colour. Mine was made of a fuzzy material. She would add woolen hat, pink scarf, mittens and push or maybe me roll me out the door.

The problem?

In New England snow might still be falling. In West Virginia the magnolias were already in bloom and Anita Best, my friend across the street was running in her dress without a sweater as I waddled along trying to catch up.

Because it was March and in my grandmother's world view, snowsuits were still to be worn. For an extremely intelligent woman, I will never understand why she couldn't make the temperature transition.

I was lucky I didn't come in from playing roasted enough to satisfy even the most finicky cannibal.

The cultural differences for my family going from New England Yankee (Damm Yankee as the people at the grocery store called my mother) as my changing countries decades later. After two years, my mother had had enough of the South. She packed us up and moved back North. My father followed later.

Although in the US, I've lived mainly in Boston, I've also made Germany, France and Switzerland my home. In each I've tried to get to know the locals, embrace their customs whether it is two or three cheek kisses, shaking hands, or staring into everyone's eyes during a toast. I've eaten their foods and followed their unwritten rules (discovering them has been half the fun).

I've never ever worn another blue snowsuit in warm weather. Or a red one, or a green one or . . .