Christmas is behind us and now it’s just WINTER. Here in the frozen northeast, winter lasts until roughly the first of May, or until enough of us who live here have snapped and begun talking to inanimate objects and cursing at the sky. It seems that ol’ Mother Nature just has to extract her pound of flesh each and every year. In those years when we have a “mild” winter, the mindset is that we will somehow pay dearly for escaping mind-numbing cold, fierce snowstorms and heating bills that look like phone numbers.
Don’t get me wrong, there is much to recommend this climate. For example, we don’t get hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, California-style wildfires, or months on end of searing heat and humidity. Oh sure, we get our share (sometimes) of hot weather. But our summers can’t hold a candle to the drenching humidity of Florida, or the broiling inferno of Arizona, also known as Nature’s Frying Pan, that assaults the residents of those states for roughly half of the year. We do get ice storms which are meteorological oddities in which it’s just warm enough to drizzle and just cold enough for that precipitation to coat everything – trees, cars, houses, power lines, roads, slow moving farm animals – with a thick layer of ice. The result can be days without electricity, downed trees blocking roads, school closings, really irritable farm animals and a form of cabin fever much like what the Donner Party must have experienced just before they decided to start eating each other back in the winter of 1846. The Donner Party was also known as the Donner-Reed Party given the fact that the original group of westward-bound adventurers had been organized by James Frasier Reed and was later joined by the George Donner group. If one pronounces the name of the cannibalistic Donner-Reed group fast enough it sounds like Donna Reed, the beautiful actress who played America’s mom on the Donna Reed Show from 1958-1966. As far as I know, Donna Reed was not a cannibal.
Getting back to the original point, winter in the northeast, we now face about 4 months of gray skies, freezing weather, snow, ice and perhaps fantasies about cannibalism. Perhaps we should all just relax and watch reruns of the Donna Reed Show until the first of May (and not put Aunt Martha on the dinner menu).