Well, OK then. So, we loved the 70-degree days we had a week or so ago and we started making plans for our garden, vegetable and flower. My husband, the ever-fervid farm boy that he is, hooked up the tilling disk to one of the big John Deeres, broke up that piece of rich soil just out by our house and planned how many of each plant he would need to enjoy this summer’s bounty.
Now it’s two weeks later and as I sit here in our warm little log house on Feb. 20, fire booming, heat roaring and the cold wind blowing 20 mph outside along with frigid temps feeling like it’s 7 degrees, I am disheartened and my spirits are dampened with the thoughts, “Will this winter never be over?”
We traveled to the Mississippi Gulf Coast last week to check on our house to make sure the pipes underneath had not frozen. Do you hear me? Pipes not frozen on the beach. We have never, ever had to think about such a calamity. Yet, there we had several inches of snow on the sandy beaches two weeks ago. How unusual is that?
We are having so many baby cows born here nearly all the time and we are surely praying they don’t freeze to death if one is born in the bitter cold of the weather, especially at night. We ride through the herd of black cows, when we aren’t freezing, to make sure one is not frozen. But there are lots of them and we could surely miss one or two.
This makes me think of all the talk of “global warming.” Could all this bizarre weather pattern be indicative of this phenomenon? I will admit to you I am not an authority on this, but something is surely different than most weather patterns that I have experienced in my lifetime. Mississippi weather is so unpredictable: hot one day, cool the next, but not 70 degrees one day and 8 degrees a few days later. This is so unexpected.
It seems as if the weather forecasters on the television stations have an aversion to predicting the weather as if they feel we are ready to throw something at the screen as they talk of the frigid weather patterns so many degrees below normal for this time of the year. It’s not their fault. I feel like they are just as puzzled as we are at this unusual weather outlined forecast.
That’s enough of my disappointment, so now I will just grab my book, get comfortable in my rocking chair, and enjoy the blazing fire once more and maybe, just maybe, we can plant all our vegetables in only a few more weeks out of this polar weather.
I really love to cook, but in this weather, I’d just as soon eat soup every day. But for some reason, I can’t talk Roy into this idea. This is something easy and good on a cold night.
