Thursday, March 5, 2015

Yeah, It's a Snow Day!

by Pa Rock
Farmer in Winter

When I crawled out of bed yesterday, the snow that had been on the ground for nearly two weeks was almost gone - with just big white patches scattered here and there.  But before noon it was sleeting, and by early afternoon the view through my living room window resembled something out of a Jack London novel.  I half expected to see Sarah Palin mushing her trusty team across the yard on the way to a book-burning.

"On Track, on Trig, on Todd-boy and Tripp!"

To celebrate what appeared for all intents and purposes to be a raging blizzard, I made a mug of instant oatmeal and settled in to watch the first two episodes of Northern Exposure.   That had been my dad's favorite television program back in the day - before Desperate Housewives came along.

Today the world is once again white as far as aging eyes can see, though it isn't that deep - only around four inches or so.  The winds are still brisk, traffic out on the road is light, and I am thinking about another mug of that oatmeal - or perhaps I'll mix it up a little and have some steaming hot chocolate.  It's not yet noon, and Rosie and I have already made two prolonged trips outside to take care of our birds, both wild and domestic.  So far everyone at The Roost seems to be weathering the winter in fine fettle.

Rosie is turning into quite the snow dog.  She loves to be outside running through the white stuff - like a furry little snowplow on crack!  Surprisingly, she will march out in the snow to do her business without hesitation.  Rosie, a big fan of the late Ozarks humorist, Vance Randolph, is thinking about compiling her own volume of Ozarks jokes and tall tales.  Her tentative title is Pooping in the Snow!

Good luck with that, Rosie!

Sixty years ago when I was but a lad whose age was a single digit, one of our regular winter activities was  making snow ice-cream.  I don't have the recipe and haven't eaten any snow ice-cream in years, but I remember that it could be made relatively quickly and was delicious.  But then in the late 1950's and early 1960's word began spreading that eating snow ice-cream was dangerous because the snow contained radioactive fallout from all of the atomic testing that the United States and Russia were doing.    I guess that as long as the fallout was limited to snow, and as long as us humans avoided eating snow, we were safe.   Surely our government would have warned us if that were not the case.

Don't you miss Norman Rockwell's view of America?  What would he have done with Ferguson? Or the tea-bagger movement?  Or hate from the pulpit?  Or gun madness?

The snow is getting to me . . I'm rambling . . . enough, already!

1 comment:

Xobekim said...

They never fed us snow ice cream from the first snow of the season. Their thinking was the first snowfall captured all the pollution. Anyway I remember the snow, vanilla, and sugar, but had forgotten the milk. Here's a recipe http://familycrafts.about.com/od/creativesnacks/r/icecrsnow.htm