Pam's Blog: Enough With the Snow

All together now:

 

"Enough with the snow!"

 

As I sweep the latest accumulation from my back step before walking out to the barn in the early hours, I can hear my friend, Heidi, who resides in New Hampshire, berating me via e-mail:

 

"Ha! You don't know what winter is! Try spending a month up here!"

 

Well, that's the point...I don't live in New Hampshire. I live in the Upstate of South Carolina and if I wanted devastating winters, I would have settled in Fargo, White Plains or Osh Kosh. Instead, I chose a destination not too far from my home state of Georgia, whose winter might give me a nice dusting of snow around Christmas to get me in the yuletide mood and not wear out its welcome by thoughtfully departing around February.

 

El Nino, "The Little Boy," we are told, is responsible for all of our recent storms. How well I remember that brat from my years of California: torrential rains, winds and mudslides. And his sister, "Nina," is characterized by behavioral symptoms not uncommon in a fifteen year old at the mall: loopy, erratic, all over the place.

 

If there's one thing we do know, it's that, really, we can't always predict the weather. Actually, I like that. I like the fact that human beings can't have everything their climate-controlled way. Like the recession, it makes us ever so grateful for far smaller pleasures. Think about it~ after walking your dog on a blustery, raw, morning, is there anything you anticipate more than the perfect cup of coffee waiting for you in your favorite mug? You flit idly through seed catalogues, you spend a delightful morning, puttering, dreaming. Later in the year, you will forget visions of a gleaming Lexus or remodeling the kitchen ...what you will really crave in the stifling, sticky weeks of late July is a peach slushie at a roadside stand.

 

So, winter, while I'm not exactly going to 'friend' you, I will, however, continue to accept and appreciate whatever you throw our way. The trees have gotten a marvelous soaking this year and the water table is high. There should be an amazingly good first cutting of hay. And on your nastiest days, when my face is chapped from having worked the horses in a relentless wind and my fingers utterly numb as I clean tack and tuck everyone in for the night, the thought, just the thought of the long, hot, soak awaiting me with something chilled standing by in the old, zinc, container that doubles as a wine cooler, is more pleasurable than any pale-blue box from Tiffany's or every episode of "Sex And The City" on DVD.

 

I'm just that kind of gal.