52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy Winter

What was winter like when you grew up? Winter was like the picture of me and my sister, looks like I was 3 or 4 and my sister two years older than me. My dads hat on the snowman.
Spokane has winter from mid to late November through February, usually some cold weather, some snow, melting and then start cycle over again cold, snow and melting. We have had some record years of snow in the 1950s and again in the late 1960s and the latest in 2007-2008. 2009 was almost a miss we had so little snow they were worried about lack of water next summer.
Spokane is in a very dry valley in eastern Washington and we depend on snow melting slowly for moisture to raise crops and to supply the cities if the area with water for the summer.
When I was young we did a lot of sledding on the street just west of our house. It was a dirt street then and had a nice hill a block south, and then a gradual hill past us down a block north. Crossing the street in front of our house meant we needed a lookout to look for cars, but there were a lot fewer then also. Not real sure when they paved the street, but they cut down the hill on the block south so it is just a real short hill now, and since it is paved a lot of traffic uses that street today also.
We also lived two blocks from school so an easy walk even in the snow. They did have short lunches in the winter so we ate at school, in the warmer weather they had long lunches and we could go home for lunch if we wanted.
Mom and grandma spent a lot of time in the fall canning, that tree just above my sisters head is an apricot tree and has a lot of apricots each year, mom also bought peaches and pears and canned them. So we ate a lot of canned fruit in the cold winter months.
In 1968-9 I was at the university in Pullman, Washington and that was a year of records, close to 4 feet of snow, -33 degrees (no wind chill then), and every school in eastern Washington closed except for Washington State University I was going to. The university had about 80% of its students living on campus and so easy for them to get to classes.