The weatherman forecasted snow a few weeks ago and Jilda, my wife, was beside herself. She loves snow more than anyone I have ever known. Sure enough that afternoon snowflakes came down as big as silver dollars and soon the back deck was covered.
I let our dog Buddy out and he didn’t know what to make of the white stuff. He ran around in circles barking at the flakes.
When I was a kid, Mr. Plunkett, a neighbor who watched squirrels gather hickory nuts and climb up the mossy side of the tree, did our weather forecasting. Or another clue was when a dove flew into our chicken pen and got away before the rooster flogged her.
Mr. Plunkett would study the almanac and monitor the comings and goings of all critters before he made his forecasts. And during winter months when it just might snow, all the kids would consult him daily.
“ Do you think it will snow Mr. Plunkett?” and he would answer with, “ Well it will or it wont.” Sometimes he would scratch his chin, spit a stream of tobacco juice off the porch and say, “ yep, we’re in for some weather.”
Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong. But those days he was right, Mother Nature would transform our drab surroundings into winter wonderland. We would put on long handle underwear, four shirts, three sweaters, and two pair of socks and wrap our boots in plastic. We’d stay out for hours, riding homemade sleds made from hubcaps or scraps of tin.
Snowball fights would turn ugly; someone would mash a snowball into a chunk of ice and then hurl it at your head.
Finally when we all turned blue, we’d go inside for hot chocolate with marshmallows the size of golf balls. We would stand by the Warm Morning heater to thaw.
Then we’d gather fresh clean snow, mom would mix in vanilla flavoring, canned milk, and a bucket of sugar. It left us all with a sugar buzz.
Last week after that first dusting the weatherman predicted we’d get three inches of snow, we got rain instead. I thought to myself, if Mr. Plunkett had been around, he would have checked with the squirrels and told us not to get our hopes up.
