The Weather Outside is Frightful
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature can heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.” -John Muir
The wind is howling and the snow is piled in little drifts everywhere. You’d have to have some really thick walls or a tight inner room to miss it. It’s here! The storm that everyone has been talking about for a week! It doesn’t matter if it’s the prescribed twenty inches or if it’s more or less, it’s here. And you can’t hide from it. You’ll either enjoy it or be disgruntled with it. But you won’t be oblivious to it.
The wind isn’t an unfamiliar sound to me. I think that I must have grown up in the windiest spot in the county. The wind would bring the snow down the hill behind the house. Grandpa had a little hedge beside the sidewalk that would stop the wind and the snow would just pile up into a huge drift. For me that meant snow tunnels, igloos, and sleds. I was just a normal kid and probably just like you I can still feel that burn on my half frozen face and the fronts of my legs because it was way to much fun to quit playing just because you were half frozen. I loved it when the drifts were high enough that you could sled over the top of the fence. And when you got cold you could craw into a snow tunnel and out of the wind. It felt warmer but the cold would still slip through your clothes wherever you were touching the snow. I don’t think that we had snow pants back then, just two pairs of jeans and a pair of long johns. And then when you got really cold you would go in and get some of mom’s cocoa.
As I’ve gotten older the sting on my face often comes from the wind defying the snow blower and bringing the snow back into my face. And the fronts of my legs don’t usually go numb because I’m not crawling in the snow and if I was, my clothes these days are cut out for the cold. I still love getting out in it, skiing, walking around and looking at tracks. Once in while I’ll lay on my back and hold real still and feel the snowflakes on my face.
l’m not real fond of blowing snow or working in the cold or having to drive somewhere when it’s nasty out. One thing that I remember from back on the farm was that when it snowed it took twice as long to do half as much. But even then, once the necessities were finished, you didn’t attempt to do much else but still had a sense of accomplishment. All of those things that could be put for later suddenly became less important and we just hunkered down until the storm passed.
And I still love a storm. Everything revolves around it. Even the birds are slow at coming to the feeder this morning. As you hear the wind howling, take some time, stop, and even if it’s just looking at it out through the window, let your mind play in it or pray in it. It’s an opportunity that we have today that will only be a memory tomorrow.
