Oh, No...Snow!

The Bag lady had a post written for today about cattle and ranching, but when she woke up this morning it was snowing. So she changed her mind about that post. The Bag Lady hates winter. She doesn’t like the cold, although the last few years it hasn’t been nearly as cold as it could have been. And it occasionally serves a purpose on those days when the hot flashes drive her around the bend. (Just step outside for a minute and cool off!)

The Bag Lady doesn’t know why she lives here in the winter. She doesn’t ski, or snow-shoe, or skate, or even curl (which seems to her the second most boring game invented, next to golf). The only good thing about snow is that you can use it in biscuits in place of eggs. If you ever run out of eggs and want to make biscuits, use 2 tablespoons of snow for each egg…
Just about the time she starts looking at real estate somewhere warm, she remembers the summers here and hesitates. Her mother always said “He who hesitates is lost”, and that’s what happens. The Bag Lady starts thinking about the 20 hour-long days in June (and conveniently forgets the helicopter-sized mosquitoes) and decides to stick it out one more year. She knows that the warm places don’t have those long, long summer days, where it doesn’t get dark until almost midnight; then the sun starts streaking the sky pink at 3 in the morning. Where the northern sky has a glow for those 4 short hours, and, if the full moon happens to coincide with the summer solstice, it doesn’t really seem to get dark at all!

But that is half a year away, and it is snowing and dark outside. Conversely, at the winter solstice, the sun seems to rise about noon and set at 3, but of course, that isn’t really true. It gets light after 9 am and is dark again by 5. This is the time of year that the Bag Lady finds depressing. Mind you, the last few years, she starts getting depressed around the first part of July because she knows it’s all downhill from there! The days are getting shorter, and the cowboy keeps reminding her that the summer is almost over…

The Bag Lady knows that she will eventually get accustomed to the weather, sort of. She will never like it, though. She will have to force herself to leave the house every day. She knows there will be warm winter days, when the sun shines so brilliantly off the snow that it can cause blindness. She knows that the crisp air will fill her lungs and taste as sweet as an apple. She knows there will be days when the frost covers everything with a glittering coat of diamonds, and the snow crunches underfoot. There will be days when the snow squeaks under the cows’ hooves and you can see their breath rising like smoke. There will also be warm days when the Chinook winds blow down from the mountains, melting the snow and shaping it into dunes and waves; making a treacherous crust of ice everywhere. And there will be days when the sky is such an incredible shade of blue it seems to make the snow even whiter. Or is it the whiteness of the snow that makes the sky seem bluer?

The Bag Lady knows that there will be picture-perfect days, and there will be horrible, dark days when the clouds roll in and it seems the snow will never stop falling, and hey, didn’t my car used to be there under that snowbank somewhere? But she also knows that eventually it will melt, and it will be muddy and horrible, and the world will be reborn.

Perhaps that is why she lives here. What's it doing in your world today?