Re: OT: wondering

From: celia storey <storey@aristotle.net>

>Tom Krop wrote
>
>the snow was blowing sideways & someone was up on his roof chopping ice off
>the eaves of his house with an ice bar & punched a hole in the roof & wants
>to know if I can come & patch the roof rite away.

Dear Tom,

This is why I do not miss the regular seasons I remember from my girlhood
"back east."

Mom was from Rhode Island, and so when we moved to south Texas, we all
dragged with us footlockers full of fantasy memories of Yankee winters. The
ruddy glories of a Mexican holiday outshine anything I have ever
experienced "up nawth," but still we pined for snow and Bing Crosby and
sleds. And how provincial of us! Trust me, oyster loaf has nothing on
menudo. But I remember the music teacher at Airport Elementary #1 in
Crystal City, Texas, teaching a room full of little berry brown kids to
howl "Sleigh bells ring, it's the season ..." while outside the wesatch
rustled under a balmy blue sky.

Now that I live in a place that sometimes shuts down for winter and
sometimes doesn't, and sometimes shuts down only to open up again and
sometimes has ice on Halloween and tornadoes at Christmas ... I sometimes
envy the regularity of the winter reported by northern gardeners. They can
celebrate the surcease of chores winter brings them. Ellen used to add this
luminous note to her posts: "Snow blankets the garden, the gardener forgets
the struggle." (Think I have that right.) Used to make me so jealous.

To survive an Arkansas winter, you must be adaptable. It may be 80 degrees
today and 25 degrees tomorrow. It might ice over for a week but then hit
the 90s.
In Arkansas, one can get by with one wardrobe supplemented by sweatsuits
and a good jacket or two, cheap gloves -- most of the time. But sometimes
one needs snowskies to get to work. Sometimes one might be drowned by
unexpected floods or whirled off by a Christmas Day tornado. Some years we
have exhilarating falls, and some years the leaves turn brown and drop like
chaff.

Every creature, every plant that thrives in Arkansas is a being that has
learned to roll with weather's whims and adapt to the vagaries of life.
Unpredicted change is the world as we know it. All of us Arkies are the
type that take that in stride.

Would I trade ice bars for a few months of knowing I didn't have to weed?
Probably not.

celia
Little Rock





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