Snow What?

Sunday the 12th of February was a beautiful, clear, crisp, cold winter day, rare in the winter of 2012. As the day wore on, toward sunset clouds moved in. The evening air grew cold and the air moist. I could smell snow in the air, and now feel it in my bones.

My right knee began to ache, an old wives' tale, I thought to myself, but no, with each passing year, aches and pains seem to multiply. My knee is my new weather barometer.

One of my favorite pastimes is trying to out-guess the weather person on a local TV channel. I've been interested in outsmarting the weatherman since the sixth grade when my teacher, Gayle Scammons, pushed me into discovering the potential of my intelligence. She gave me a special science project to learn about weather. But now I forget what I learned back then and what the local weather person says using computer models to predict the future! Now I have a new more accurate predictor of impending weather change -- my bum right knee.

I grew up in Southern Maine, about three miles inland. When I knew snow was coming there was the hopeful anticipation that school would be called off. But it would take six inches or more of snow for that to take place.

Up in New England, they have these things called snowplows, which keep the roads clear. In 1980, my first winter in the Ozarks, I lived in Mountain View. That winter, Mountain View got its first snow plow. The Public Works department welded a rusty slab of straight sheet metal to the front frame on a pickup truck.

It did an efficient job of smoothing the road into a slick icy surface.

I love a good Ozarks' snow in Eureka Springs, especially knowing that by the time you read this, it will be a memory from earlier in the week.

Growing up in Maine, snow was the ground cover for months on end. As a child I remember the joys of snow. As an adult living in the Ozarks, my greatest joy related to winter snow is the anticipation that it will melt soon enough. ญญ