Yes, it is cold enough for me.
Our frigid flatland March days seldom attract the attention of those East Coast TV nabobs with their sprayed-on hair and dime-sized eyes.
If it happens to get cold back in the namby-pamby East, television people have a hand-wringing time whining about it.
We chuckle and slap our knees at eastern reporters standing with shoulders hunched against a winter’s gale and carrying around yard-sticks to probe little snow banks to show just how deep the snow is.
It’s all very entertaining to us, because we’ve been there, shoveled that.
The problem we have out here on the Plains is that we just can’t tell the truth about our weather without lying about it.
As New Yorkers or urban cowboys in Dallas grumble and spin their car tires in the blackish, smog-infected slush, we silently observe past blizzard anniversaries.
We flatlanders have cold for breakfast. A little wind scratching at the latchstring doesn’t faze us a bit. And we can even take the heat if it’s forced upon us.
If it gets too hot, we start a fire in the wood-burning stove and take turns putting our heads in the oven to cool off.
Flatland hot is when we use cold irons to press our clothes.
One hot summer day, it rained after a long drought and a raindrop hit my dad on the head. It knocked him cold and we had to throw three buckets of dust in his face to bring him back around.
I remember that in 1935, the creek south of town was so dry it only ran three days a week, but twice on Sunday. Raccoons were carrying water to the sweet corn.
The dust storms were terrible. We once saw a straw hat in a dust-filled ditch. When we stopped to pick it up there was a man under it. We offered him a ride but he said: “No thanks, I’m riding my horse.”
And cold lasted forever. I remember it was so cold one day that when my mother set her tea kettle full of hot water outside to cool, it froze up so fast that the ice in it was still warm.
One night at milking time it was so cold that the milk formed slim icicles before it hit the pail. So we took the icicles inside and stood them on end on the stove to thaw before we could run the cream separator.
An uncle of mine who homesteaded out in West River country on the South Dakota-Nebraska border wasn’t exactly sure in what state he lived. He thought it was South Dakota. When he was told by a government surveyor that his house was actually in Nebraska, he was relieved to know that he wouldn’t have to put up with South Dakota blizzards anymore.
But out here there are years and years filled with beautiful days.
One year stands out. That spring and summer just the right amount of moisture fell in well-spaced, gentle rains.
The conditions were excellent for the pumpkins in our garden. Except the vines grew so fast that they wore holes in the pumpkins just dragging them along behind them.
So how come CNN never reports about them apples?
If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.
