It is the worst of times. Now is the winter of my discontent, just like the last one, and the other last one, and the last one before that. My poor soul has been frozen by the harsh Yankee slush that comes back to plague us every year. Year after year, I find myself in complete misery around Groundhog Day. I wait in suspense every year to see what General Beauregard Lee, Georgia’s state groundhog, predicts.
Will I feel the warm embrace of spring again soon? Or, am I cursed to carry out my morning chores in misery, as I break the ice on my animals’ water buckets and continue to suffer the stabbing pain of a drop of cold water that finds the one gap in my coat and travels down my back like a bolt of frozen electricity? Either way, that fickle overfed dirt rat predicted six more weeks of winter back in February and spring cannot get here fast enough for this old boy.
It seems the sunny days are few and far between in the winter wonderland. “Wonderland,” in this sense, meaning: “Wonder if I’ll ever be warm again?” or “Wonder if I have enough antifreeze to make sure my truck doesn’t suffer a stroke at the hands of Jack Frost?” or “Wonder how fast I can get out of these coveralls when nature calls?” I know, you think me a curmudgeon who longs for the 1,000 degree heat and endless onslaught of the needle-nosed blood suckers. Let me assure you that the woes of the heat are not unknown to me, but the pros very much outweigh the cons.
The cruel winter steals the color from my world. My personal Eden has had the color slowly drained from it as winter tightens its grip around our throats. The lush, soft, green grass replaced by dull hues of brown. The barren trees and ash gray sky produce a color pallet reminiscent of the cold stones of a dungeon. The world, in some ways, appears as a fading memory, losing detail as the months march by. Today, there were less leaves than yesterday, yesterday there was less sunshine than the day before.
To me, it is a constant reminder of our own mortality. With this, comes the seasonal depression. The frosted melancholia that sets its hooks into our hearts as we try to live our lives week to week in the frozen South. Not only must we battle the elements, but at this point we are fighting the very worst thoughts our minds can muster. The bleak dead of winter is a lonely place for a child born of the Southern summer harvest.
Alas, dear friends, who shiver in the blistering cold., I bring you tidings of great joy. For by day the birds are returning. Their songs bringing glad tidings of the coming thaw. The sun shines on our face again as a reward for our heartedness and perseverance of the cold winter months. Free from the icy clutches of Jack Frost we will be warm again. Warm and free from the cruel cold of winter. Our gardens will be bountiful with a new harvest.
Everything will be good again. Spring is returning and we move on, as we always do.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
Excellent! Enjoyable to read. Thanks!
With the return of Spring in South-Central Oklahoma comes also the return of the always dreaded Tornado Season. But you take the bad with the good and thank God you don’t live on or near the Equator where the changing of seasons is virtually non-existent.
I was stationed at Elmendorf for three of the four years I was in the USAF. Anchorage is of course near the Arctic Circle, so the winters there are exceedingly long, and during which time darkness rules the day and the night. The only light during the winter months is artificial or man made. And that’s no way for human beings to live.
My wife and I were good friends with a couple from Georgia – Sonny and Karen. Sonny literally hated everything about Alaska. Indeed, his hatred for everything Alaska was so intense that he holed himself up in their apartment the entire three years they were there, only to come out to work his AF job and essentially nothing more with rare exception as necessity occasionally dictated.
I understood where he was coming from to an extent; there are lots of things to dislike about Alaska, but there are things to like about it too. And life is what you make of it in spite of latitude and everything else, right? Right. Albeit, Sonny didn’t quite see it that way, so he lived a miserable hermit’s existence the entire three years they were in Alaska, including during the Summer months when the sun makes its circuit around the sky 22 hrs out of the day, only to dip slightly below the horizon for a couple of hours, then right back up again.
For lots of us youthful “farm boys,” this time of year was highly anticipated, and having been reared on the principle that you “make hay when the son shines,” this meant that we probably averaged no more than three hours of sleep a day during the Summer months. Although I will say that the “crash” would inevitably hit us once a month or so, when our spirits were willing but the flesh was weak. We had to make up for lost sleep on those occasions in any case, bad as we hated to and whether it hairlipped the governor or not.
I’m not particularly fond of the intense heat and humidity of the Summer months in Southern Oklahoma, and Tornado Season around these parts is always a little nerve racking, but I’ll take it over any other place I’ve lived during my life. The people “make the place” in any case, and the people who live in these parts are mostly ‘salt of the earth’ non-meddling types. And that fact, above all else, makes life tolerable when it otherwise might not be.