The weatherman forecasted snow a few days ago and my wife was beside herself. Jilda loves snow more than anyone I have ever known. It started snowing just after lunch that day and the snowflakes were as big as silver dollars. In about an hour, our deck was covered with snow.
I let our dog Buddy go out and he wasn’t quite sure of all that cold white stuff.
He skittered around, barking and licking at the flakes falling from the sky. It was a hoot watching him.
Back when I was a kid, weather forecasting was limited to Mr. Plunkett, a neighbor who did his forecasting watching squirrels and the rest of nature do out of the ordinary things. If squirrels gathered hickory nuts and ran up the north side of a mossy tree or maybe a dove would fly into the chicken pen, then escape the rooster; Mr. Plunkett would make a forecast.
He studied the almanac religiously and he was our local weather authority.
“Do you thing it snow?” We would ask and usually he would answer, “ Well either it will or it won’t “ as he gazed up at the sky. Sometimes after careful consideration of all the signs, he would scratch his chin, spit a stream of tobacco juice and say, “ Yep, we are in for some weather.”
Sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong…kind of like modern day forecasters. But when he was right, we’d wake up to world of snow.
Mother Nature would transform our drab surroundings into a winter wonderland. We’d put on four shirts, three sweaters, a scarf, two pair of socks and a toboggan and a pair of boots in preparation for our snow day. Mom would wrap our boots with plastic to keep our feet dry and we would stay out for hours, riding homemade sleds out of hubcaps or scrap tin.
Snowball fights would get ugly if someone mashed a snowball too hard. It would become a chunk of ice and hurt like heck if you got nailed.
When we turned blue from the cold, we would head inside to thaw by the old Warm Morning heater.
Mom would make us big mugs of homemade hot chocolate covered with marshmallows. Afterwards we would gather clean snow in a big dishpan. Mom mixed the snow with vanilla flavoring, Carnation milk and a load of sugar. That cold, sugar filled stuff would leave you with a buzz.
Nowadays, we have radar, satellite and computers to help predict the weather, but you know, they get it wrong sometimes. After our first little dusting, the weatherman predicted we would get three inches of snow, but we got rain instead. Jilda went from giddy to sad. I thought to myself, had Mr. Plunkett been alive he would have checked with the squirrels and told us not to get our hopes up.
